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As soon as you find your voice, you’ve lost it                                                                          Jon Anderson * Shifting the point of view is…

Today is June 19. For those that don’t know, this is a holiday celebrated in some parts of America as Juneteenth. Also known as Freedom Day, it marks the day that the Union army arrived in Texas in 1865 and actually enforced the Emancipation Proclamation, more than two years after it was declared. Juneteeth, famously,…

I knew Katherine Case as a poet first. We were in a poetry workshop together at Mills College, and I was enthralled with her ability to integrate so many ideas into a poem that was usually one breathless sentence. Little did I know that when class ended, and I was bobbing around in water aerobics,…

One of my best students was a plagiarizer. I felt stupid, when I found out—I had known her for two years, and I had worked with her intensively as her thesis adviser, for months. And I wasn’t the one who caught her, either, which was embarrassing because the poets and poems she plagiarized were ones…

The End of the StoryLiliana HekerTrans. Andrea G. LabingerBiblioasis, Spring 2012184 pages$16.95 Type: metafiction, urgent Lens: kaleidoscopic Tones: questioning, contemplative, analytic, detached wryness

The Literary Boroughs series will explore little-known and well-known literary communities across the country and world and show that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally. The series will run on our blog from May 2012 until AWP13 in Boston. Please enjoy the fifth post on Brooklyn, New York by…

I’ll admit up front: of all the literary genres, I know the least about playwriting. I’ve written fiction and nonfiction, obviously, and I’ve dabbled (mostly unsuccessfully) in poetry, but the stage play? Never attempted it. I’m not sure why. When I’m at conferences or artists’ colonies, I never miss a playwright’s performance. They’re invariably my…

This week, I’m posting a short little video on the topic of dialogue in prose and how big a fan I am of dialogue not being there. Of course — as I say, if I remember right, in the video — writers are urged to include and even rely on characters to show up a…

As a poetry editor at Prick of the Spindle, I find that poems about certain subjects, such as childhood, love, aging, and death, often lean too heavily on nostalgia, so that the language limps. In fact, I’ve been guilty of writing my own nostalgic poems now and again— and again. Hey, nobody said this poetic…