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 […]
February 27, 2017
The Autobiography of Anything
As of this writing, I’ve spent the last few days hanging around home nursing a cold. During this time, I’ve listened to This American Life, read from Angela Carter’s Book […]
July 21, 2016
Histories of Our Faces
I recently returned home from teaching for two weeks in the Between the Lines program at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program in Iowa City. The session in which I taught […]
October 22, 2015
1,369 Light Bulbs, or, How to Write in a Basement
Ralph Ellison wrote the first page of Invisible Man while staying at a friend’s farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. He had been to the farm before, and upon his first visit […]
July 20, 2015
Poetry and Play (Part I)
When I was in Amsterdam earlier this summer, the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga came up in multiple conversations about poetry; more specifically, his 1938 book Homo Ludens: Proeve […]
June 17, 2015
Teach This, Not That!
I don’t mean that, of course. Whatever “this” and “that” are, I probably believe in teaching both of them. (This post’s title is really just a silly tongue-firmly-in-cheek reference to a […]
May 31, 2015
Making (and [the Next]) Generation Part II: Educator Interview with Adam Kaplan
My previous post began a series of posts focusing on teaching, writing, and youth. The new anthology Please Excuse This Poem is the catalyst for this investigation, and I shared poems and reflections from […]
May 30, 2015
Making (and [the Next]) Generation
This March, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation, edited by Brett Fletcher Lauer and Lynn Melnick, was published under the imprint of “Viking Books for Young […]