July 5, 2019
Craft Is Not Monolithic: An Interview with Luisa A. Igloria and Amanda Galvan Huynh, Editors of Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making
Earlier this year, I embarked on one of the single most important endeavors of my literary career thus far: an interview series with the authors and editors of craft books. […]
July 4, 2019
Detroit, 1969
Hamburgers and watermelon. Mad Dog 20/20 on boyfriend Phil’s breath. That summer, Marsha and I sold Black Panther Party newspapers downtown, hustling in front of Hudson’s like the revolutionary vanguard […]
July 3, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – July
Sometimes a mismatched couple wanders by, and the whispers begin before they’ve even passed. Meanwhile, they stroll on, blissfully unaware, as if they were the most obvious pair in the […]
June 28, 2019
Checking Your Pedagogical Receipts
Lesson planning is by nature a fraught endeavor. It necessitates thinking not just about the content of the class but the shape of the course as a whole, the juxtaposition […]
June 26, 2019
Verve {in} Verse: In Conversation with Jared Harél
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. […]
June 19, 2019
Ken Kesey’s “Keyhole of Literature”
In an essay published in The New York Times in 1989 (incidentally, the year I was born), Ken Kesey recounts a writing lesson he once received from short story writer […]
June 10, 2019
Poetry for People Who Hate Poetry – June
But does poetry actually change anything? Does it need to? Maybe poets are, as Percy Bysshe Shelley writes, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Or maybe W.H. Auden is right that […]
June 10, 2019
A Decade of CantoMundo: In Conversation with Celeste Guzman Mendoza & Deborah Paredez
This past weekend was the last year of a 10-year term for Co-Directors Celeste Guzman Mendoza and Deborah Paredez, who along with Carmen Tafolla, Norma E. Cantú and Pablo Martínez […]
June 4, 2019
Amsterdam
A decade ago, well before I dared to call myself a writer and certainly before I published two books, I gave myself the extravagance of a week in a city […]
June 2, 2019
VERVE {IN} VERSE: IN CONVERSATION WITH MARCUS JACKSON
Note: Verve {in} Verse is my poet-focused feature here at The Kenyon Review in which I converse with poets about their work and interests both on and off the page. […]
May 31, 2019
Why American Poets Ought to Translate More Poems
As literary translators go, I am mostly a fraud, and thus beset by a fear that all frauds—from TV psychics to reality TV presidents—share: to be exposed by those who […]
May 30, 2019
The Wow Moment: On the Joys of Teaching
June 2009. My classmates and I are gathered in a dimly lit room in Rome, where our instructors, Stephanie Vaughn and Michael Koch, lead Cornell’s annual summer creative writing program […]