From Start-up to Incubator: Kundiman Means Business (of Innovative Writing)
Kundiman has become one of the most exciting and admired literary communities in America. Its story begins with a handful of people, scraping together funds and finding volunteers, to get going.
The Psychopathic Gaze: Murder, Violence, and Misogyny in Natsuo Kirino’s Out
Out is an exhausting but indispensable blood-and-guts novel that constructs real, complex, contradictory, and authentically credible female characters who transgress the social hierarchies of Japanese culture while also defying the sexist and stock stereotypes of women as helpless victims in both slasher and thriller genres.
A Parliament of Poems: An Interview with Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Elliott Clarke
Given that Toronto poet, editor, critic, novelist and librettist George Elliott Clarke is Canada’s seventh official Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2016-17), I thought it would be interesting to explore some of his experiences now that he’s a bit more than halfway through his two-year term.
The Current
Lately I’ve been thinking more than usual, like a lot of us, I suspect, about the two stages I occupy at the same time, in each moment and with every decision: the personal and the political. My own small domestic stage has stretched.
On Being An Impostor: This Girl’s Life
I should have graduated high school in the year 2000. I was young for my year and, as my mother put it, “immature.” Instead of plodding along through public school, I spent tenth grade begging my parents to allow me to apply to The Hill School...
“Why Doctors Make Natural Writers”
Doctors have been writers for as long as they have been doctors. The disciplinary divide between the humanities and sciences is a recent invention. Judging by the quantity and quality of writing by doctors in the past several decades alone, I might also suggest that some of our best
Understanding Team Mom in The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club is more than a book about mothers and daughters, although it's easy to choose sides while reading the generational 1989 novel.
In Frances Mayes’ Book, Another Starring Role for Food
Last month, I wrote about the starring role food plays in Peter Mayle’s memoir, A Year in Provence. Frances Mayes’ Under the Tuscan Sun: At Home in Italy has been called the Italian equivalent of Mayle’s book. Mayes is a poet, so it is natural that her prose charms
The 2016 Ploughshares Count
Every year at the open of the annual AWP Conference, we publish our gender statistics, taking a cue from VIDA’s important work. While we don’t collect demographic information on any of our writers, we publish the gender statistics of those whose gender identities we can find documented elsewhere (their
Not-Quite States
Doug Mack is not your average travel writer. In his new book, The Not-Quite States of America: Dispatches from the Territories and Other Far-Flung Outposts of the USA, Mack goes to the five American colonies, shedding stark light on the politics and history of the mainland.