Author: A.K. Afferez

In our Writing Lessons series, writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Rhonda White, a soon-t0-be graduate of Converse College’s low-residency MFA program. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor Writing is a solitary process, and that may be why some of us join an…

In our Writing Lessons series, writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Erin Somers, a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of New Hampshire. Erin is also the editor-in-chief of Barnstorm Literary Journal, and her other writing has appeared on…

In our Writing Lessons series, writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Sahar Mustafah, a second-year MFA candidate and Follett Graduate Scholar in Fiction Writing at Columbia College Chicago. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor I was going to write the next Great American…

  [Editor’s note: this post was contributed by Joshua Garstka.] The Fall of the Stone City Ismail Kadare (translated by John Hodgson) Grove Press, February 2013 168 pages $23.00 Gjirokastër was not as wise as it should have been. Or perhaps it was wiser. It came to the same thing. Just before World War II,…

This post contributed by Anne Champion. Petrarchan Kristina Marie Darling BlazeVOX Books, 2013 69 pages $16.00 Kristina Marie Darling’s accolades already include eleven books of poetry, and her newest collection, Petrarchan, keeps up with this furious creative momentum. In Darling’s past work, she has carved out a form of poetry all her own, built from…

At AWP 2013 in Boston, author Melanie Rae Thon read the following during the panel “The Literary Legacy of Andre Dubus.” Ploughshares founding editor DeWitt Henry attended the panel, and thought the piece was so beautiful that, with Melanie’s permission, we are reproducing it here. —Andrew Ladd, blog editor In the introduction to Fires in the…

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama Alison Bechdel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, May 2012 304 pages $22.00 This post was contributed by Kim Liao. As a nonfiction writer, I envy visual artists. They get a palette of colors and canvases and, as a result, a vocabulary at their disposal beyond my 26 letters. And there…

This post was contributed by Julia Ventola. Tucked away in the heart of Chicago’s Wicker Park, 826CHI is a thriving non-profit writing and tutoring center, dedicated to Chicago’s six- to eighteen-year-old students.  It is a member of Dave Eggers’ national organization, at which, throughout the country, volunteers and staff alike tutor over 30,000 students a…

  This post was written by John Rodzvilla, Emerson College’s Electronic Publisher-in-Residence. There has always been somewhat of an unrealized promise of interactivity with digital literature. It should be more than an enhanced experience of the print original, but still reflect the intentions of the artists. The Electronic Literature movement has tried to legitimize and…