Elizabeth Alexander

Round-Down: Poetry, Memoir, and the Ever-Shifting “I”

Round-Down: Poetry, Memoir, and the Ever-Shifting “I”

Recently, a trend has emerged: more and more poets are turning to memoir. In the last two weeks alone I have read essays by Tracy K. Smith about her new memoir and reviews of Elizabeth Alexander’s. Both detail the reasons for the authors’ switch in form, making me wonder, as Smith does in her essay, if prose offers something…

All-Time Favorite Writing Prompts
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All-Time Favorite Writing Prompts

To round out this year of blogging about writing prompts, I polled writers and writing teachers for their favorite writing prompts–generally, simple prompts that have been useful to them as writers, students, and teachers. One such prompt that I found extremely useful in my early days of writing was, “Write about an obsession.” From this…