Friends of Writers has overseen the production of these five anthologies from Warren Wilson faculty. All editors and contributors donate 100% of royalties to the Friends of Writers scholarship funds.
Furthermore, each time you purchase a book through the links below, Amazon.com donates a percentage to the Friends of Writers scholarship funds. Thank you for your support!
In a splendid display of show-and-tell, 26 writers tell a story and lift the curtain to reveal how they did it.
This big, beautiful anthology of short fiction is for readers, writers, and anyone curious about the mysterious processes of literary minds. All contributors have been recent faculty members of the prestigious Warren Wilson Low Residency Program, including such literary favorites as Margot Livesey, Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Jim Shepard, Antonya Nelson, David Shields, and the editors themselves.
Each writer was asked to submit an original story, accompanied by an essay describing the challenges of the story and how they were met. Since writers resist herding, the editors were happily surprised by the wide range of essays—"fiction writers, when given the space, think about their work very differently." We learn about the genesis of a story, how story evolves, what was eventually relinquished and why, and how a story—surprisingly—might "insist" on changing.
Arranged alphabetically by author, and beginning with Richard Russo's cogent introduction, this volume is a treasure throughout.
“This rich anthology, which offers shrewd insight into writers' approaches—thereby sating our desires for their secrets while validating our own eccentric quirks—reassures all lovers of good writing that there is no one correct way to craft a good tale. The contributors, all recent faculty members at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers in Swannanoa, N.C., offer model short stories followed by informal mini-essays on how they came to fruition…This collection is a treasure trove of literary encouragement and wisdom.” —Publishers Weekly
About the Editors:
Peter Turchi, former director of the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program, teaches at Arizona State University and is the author of Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer.
Andrea Barrett, winner of the National Book Award for Ship Fever, lives in Rochester, New York.
A follow-up to the highly praised Poets Teaching Poets, Daniel Tobin and Pimone Triplett's Poet's Work, Poet's Play gathers together essays by some of the most important voices in contemporary poetry: Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eleanor Wilner, Dean Young, and the late Larry Levis and Agha Shahid Ali.
Lively, accessible, and erudite, the pieces range from discussions on syntax and the syllable to an exploration of the complexities of canon formation under the shadow of imperialism, race, and history. Exploring the work of John Donne, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, Philip Larkin, Charles Olsen, Ezra Pound, Anne Carson, Robert Herrick, Harryette Mullen, and many others, Poet's Work, Poet's Play —like its predecessor volume—will be an invaluable tool for teachers, students, and poets at every level.
"Much more than a set of essays on poetic craft or aesthetic understandings, this collection takes on two of the most prevalent anxieties about writing poetry in our time: the place of subjectivity in poetry, and how to make a significant shape in language while both affirming and interrogating the poetic I's authority. This is a book for anyone who wants to write better poems, who wants to read with greater passion, and who believes that poetry is an independent category of human consciousness that can be as capaciousness as the world, and as nuanced." —Tom Sleigh, author of Space Walk and Far Side of the Earth
"Gathering together essays by unquestionably important poets, Poet's Work, Poet's Play has immense pedagogical value in the way it demonstrates how to discover in poetry resources of language and structure often overlooked in first, and ensuing, readings of complex texts." —Laurence Goldstein, Professor of English, University of Michigan, and Editor, Michigan Quarterly Review
"A valuable document illuminating critical aspects of the contemporary American poetry scene."
—John Koethe, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and author of Sally's Hair: Poems
About the Editors:
Daniel Tobin, Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College, is the author of poetry collections The Narrows, Double Life, and Where the World is Made.
Pimone Triplett is the author of the poetry collections The Price of Light, winner of the Levis Poetry Prize, and Ruining the Picture, which won the Hazel Hall Poetry Award. She currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington.
Poets Teaching Poets collects essays by current and former lecturers at Warren Wilson, including acclaimed poets Joan Aleshire, Marianne Boruch, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dobyns, Reginald Gibbons, Louise Glück, Allen Grossman, Robert Haas, Tony Hoagland, Heather McHugh, Gregory Orr, Michael Ryan, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Alan Williamson, Eleanor Wilner, and Renate Wood.
This passionate and provocative anthology presents an extended, insightful dialogue on an astonishing range of topics: writers from Homer, Dickinson, and Akhmatova to Bishop, O'Hara, Milosz, and Plath; meditations on the nature of the image and the discovery of the self in Greek verse; a passionate defense of lyric poetry; and other engaging themes. Whatever their subject, these essays are, at the core, passionate and thoughtful meditations on the place of poetry in contemporary culture.
Poets Teaching Poets will be an invaluable tool for teachers and students of poetry and poetics at every level. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the connections between craft and the larger issues of art, and in the continuing and exciting relevance of poetry today.
About the Editors:
Gregory Orr is author of six books of poetry, most recently City of Salt, and of two books of criticism, Richer Entanglements: Essays and Notes on Poetry and Poems and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He is Professor of English, University of Virginia.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is founder and former director of the low-residency MFA Writing Program at Goddard College and teaches in its relocated incarnation at Warren Wilson College. She has published four volumes of poetry and has received numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
In Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, seventeen award-winning writers—all expert teachers—share the secrets of creating compelling, imaginative stories and novels. A combination handbook, writer's companion, and collection of spirited personal essays, the book is filled with specific examples, hard-won wisdom, and compassionate guidance for the developing or experienced fiction writer.
Each of the contributors is a current or former lecturer at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, one of the most highly respected writing programs in the country. Included are essays by Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Karen Brennan, Judith Grossman, Ehud Havazelet, C. J. Hribal, Margot Livesey, Michael Martone, Kevin McIlvoy, Pablo Medina, Antonya Nelson, Susan Neville, Richard Russo, Steven Schwartz, Jim Shepard, Joan Silber, Debra Spark, Peter Turchi, and Chuck Wachtel.
Rich with masterful examples and personal anecdotes, these imaginative essays provide hard-earned insight into a writer's work. The book will interest not only those seeking inspiration and guidance to become stronger writers, but also readers of contemporary literary fiction, who will find a number of surprising and original approaches to the writer's work by award-winning practitioners adept at teaching others what they know.
"I've been greatly instructed by these brilliant essays, many of which I first heard as lectures by my fellow faculty members in the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Now, happily, writers everywhere can profit from these essential and inspiring words."
—Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever
About the Editors:
Charles Baxter is author of several novels, including The Feast of Love, Shadow Play, and First Light, and collections of stories including Believers and A Relative Stranger. He teaches writing at the University of Michigan.
Peter Turchi is author of the novel The Girls Next Door, a collection of stories, Magician, and a book of non-fiction, The Pirate Prince. He is Director of the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College.
Hammer and Blaze provides a true cross-section of the best contemporary poets writing in North America today. Editors Ellen Bryant Voigt and Heather McHugh have brought together the work of sixty poets who have taught at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, one of the most respected and influential writing programs of its kind.
The stellar group of contributors includes MacArthur fellows Campbell McGrath, Anne Carson, Edward Hirsch, Eleanor Wilner, Susan Stewart, and Lucia Perillo. Also represented here are works by Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Dunn and Louise Glück; Ruth Lilly Prize winner Carl Dennis; and Robert Wrigley, Thomas Lux, and B. H. Fairchild, winners of the Kingsley Tufts Award. From the couplets of Pablo Medina to the neoclassical lyricisms of Carl Phillips, this anthology appropriately reflects the cross-cultural nature of contemporary North American poetry with its most diverse and prestigious voices. A number of the poems are previously unpublished, including work by Joan Aleshire, Stuart Dischell, Stephen Dobyns, Stephen Dunn, Roland Flint, Carol Frost, Barbara Greenberg, Edward Hirsch, Pablo Medina, Steve Orlen, Gregory Orr, Kathleen Peirce, Kenneth Rosen, Daniel Tobin, Alan Williamson, and Eleanor Wilner.
Hammer and Blaze, a gathering of our best poets, should garner attention from the literary world at large as well as from students of contemporary poetry and creative writing.
About the Editors:
Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of six volumes of poetry, including Kyrie, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. She has also published The Flexible Lyric (Georgia), a collection of craft essays. Founder of low-residency graduate education for writers, she has been the Vermont State Poet, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writing Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
Heather McHugh is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writer's Workshop, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Among her works are The Father of the Predicaments, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, and a translation of Euripides' Cyclops.
|
