Advertisement
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Invitation to a Bonfire Adrienne Celt, 2018-06-05 Selected by Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Parade, Oprah.com, and MSN.com as one of the best books to read this summer! The seductive story of a dangerous love triangle, inspired by the infamous Nabokov marriage, with a spellbinding psychological thriller at its core. In the 1920s, Zoya Andropova, a young refugee from the Soviet Union, finds herself in the alien landscape of an elite all-girls New Jersey boarding school. Having lost her family, her home, and her sense of purpose, Zoya struggles to belong, a task made more difficult by the malice her peers heap on scholarship students and her new country's paranoia about Russian spies. When she meets the visiting writer and fellow Russian émigré Leo Orlov--whose books Zoya has privately obsessed over for years--her luck seems to have taken a turn for the better. But she soon discovers that Leo is not the solution to her loneliness: he's committed to his art and bound by the sinister orchestrations of his brilliant wife, Vera. As the reader unravels the mystery of Zoya, Lev, and Vera's fate, Zoya is faced with mounting pressure to figure out who she is and what kind of life she wants to build. Grappling with class distinctions, national allegiance, and ethical fidelity--not to mention the powerful magnetism of sex--Invitation to a Bonfire investigates how one's identity is formed, irrevocably, through a series of momentary decisions, including how to survive, who to love, and whether to pay the complicated price of happiness. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Creative Writing MFA Handbook Tom Kealey, 2005-01-01 Guides prospective graduate students through the difficult process of researching, applying to, and choosing graduate schools in creative writing. This handbook includes special sections about Low-Residency writing programs, PhD programs, publishing in literary journals, and workshop and teaching advice. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Everything Change Angie Dell, Joey Eschrich, Barakat Akinsiku, Amanda Baldeneaux, J. R. Burgmann, Mason Carr, Scott Dorsch, Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, Kathryn E. Hill, Jules Hogan, Anya Ow, Natasha Seymour, 2021-04-22 A collection of short stories by writers from around the world, exploring the climate crisis and how human responses to it will shape the futures we will inhabit. Featuring stories in styles ranging from science fiction and fabulism to literary fiction, weird fiction, and action-thriller, all drawn from the 2020 Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest. The contest and anthology are presented by the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative at Arizona State University, a partnership of the Center for Science and the Imagination and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Poets & Writers Guide to MFA Programs , 2015 This essential handbook, revised and updated for 2010, provides everything you need to know about deciding where and how to apply to the best graduate creative writing programs for you. -The top programs in the United States. -How to decide where to apply. -Advice on preparing your application. -A look at PhD programs in writing. -Tips on becoming a teaching assistant. -How to get the most out of your MFA experience. A collection of articles edited by the staff of Poets & Writers Magazine, this handy resource includes straightforward advice from professionals in the literary field, additional resources to help you choose the best programs to apply to, and an application tracker to keep you organized throughout the process. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: When My Brother Was an Aztec Natalie Diaz, 2012-12-04 I write hungry sentences, Natalie Diaz once explained in an interview, because they want more and more lyricism and imagery to satisfy them. This debut collection is a fast-paced tour of Mojave life and family narrative: A sister fights for or against a brother on meth, and everyone from Antigone, Houdini, Huitzilopochtli, and Jesus is invoked and invited to hash it out. These darkly humorous poems illuminate far corners of the heart, revealing teeth, tails, and more than a few dreams. I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness by ringing a stick against the lion's cage, calling out Here, Kitty Kitty, Meow! With one swipe of a paw much like a catcher's mitt with fangs, the lion pulled the man into the cage, rattling his skeleton against the metal bars. The lion didn't want to do it— He didn't want to eat the man like a piece of fruit and he told the crowd this: I only wanted some goddamn sleep . . . Natalie Diaz was born and raised on the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation in Needles, California. After playing professional basketball for four years in Europe and Asia, Diaz returned to the states to complete her MFA at Old Dominion University. She lives in Surprise, Arizona, and is working to preserve the Mojave language. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Body He Left Behind Reese Conner, 2021-08 THE BODY HE LEFT BEHIND, Debut Poetry Collection by Reese Conner Winner of the 2020 Cider Press Review Editor's Prize Book Award. Poetry. Ekphrastic Poetry. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz, 2020-03-03 WINNER OF THE 2021 PULITZER PRIZE IN POETRY FINALIST FOR THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY Natalie Diaz’s highly anticipated follow-up to When My Brother Was an Aztec, winner of an American Book Award Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz’s brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages—bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers—be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness: “Let me call my anxiety, desire, then. / Let me call it, a garden.” In this new lyrical landscape, the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, black, and brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dunefields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality. Diaz defies the conditions from which she writes, a nation whose creation predicated the diminishment and ultimate erasure of bodies like hers and the people she loves: “I am doing my best to not become a museum / of myself. I am doing my best to breathe in and out. // I am begging: Let me be lonely but not invisible.” Postcolonial Love Poem unravels notions of American goodness and creates something more powerful than hope—in it, a future is built, future being a matrix of the choices we make now, and in these poems, Diaz chooses love. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: MINE Sarah Viren, 2018-03-01 This is a book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man’s furniture while he’s on trial for murder and follows with essays that question corporeal, familial, and intellectual forms of ownership. What does it mean to believe that a hand, or a child, or a country, or a story belongs to you? What happens if you realize you’re wrong? Mining her own life and those of others, Sarah Viren considers the contingencies of ownership alongside the realities of loss in this debut essay collection. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Dear Diaspora Kavanagh/Leung, |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Selected Proverbs Michael Brooks Cryer, 2017 Poetry. Winner of the Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award in 2016. Contest Judge, Seth Brady Tucker had this to say about it: Michael Brooks Cryer's poetry comes to us riding on static radio frequencies, channeled through the ether of our discontents and our vices; voices that purr and screech and caution us not to look away, but acknowledge that language is mutable, that 'In the beginning, the word was misused like a rag is misused when stopping up the mouth of a hostage.' We hear his epistles loosed by an array of voices, their visions cloudy and clear, strange and comforting; they show us, 'a gurney screech [ing] by with a ballerina on it,' they ask us to pay attention and listen. These poems are assured, lively, and filled with a caustic wit, and Cryer plays his poems like 'a bed of strings where [he] condition[s] your mood.' Let these sequences melt like wax candles over your HAM radio, put your ear to the leather ear pads, listen to this important voice. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 Laura Furman, 2015-09-15 The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 gathers twenty of the best short stories of the year, selected from thousands published in literary magazines. The winning stories span the globe—from the glamorous Riviera to an Eastern European shtetl, from a Native American reservation to a tiny village in Thailand. But their characters are universally recognizable and utterly compelling, whether they are ex-pats in Africa, migrant workers crossing the Mexican border, Armenian immigrants on the rough streets of East Hollywood, or pioneers in nineteenth-century Idaho. Accompanying the stories are the editor’s introduction, essays from the eminent jurors on their favorite stories, observations from the winning writers on what inspired them, and an extensive resource list of magazines. Finding Billy White Feather PERCIVAL EVERETT The Seals LYDIA DAVIS Kilifi Creek LIONEL SHRIVER The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA MANUEL MUÑOZ A Permanent Member of the Family RUSSELL BANKS A Ride out of Phrao DINA NAYERI Owl EMILY RUSKOVICH The Upside-Down World BECKY HAGENSTON The Way Things Are Going LYNN FREED The History of Happiness BRENDA PEYNADO The Kingsley Drive Chorus NAIRA KUZMICH Word of Mouth EMMA TÖRZS Cabins CHRISTOPHER MERKNER My Grandmother Tells Me This Story MOLLY ANTOPOL The Golden Rule LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ About My Aunt JOAN SILBER Ba Baboon THOMAS PIERCE Snow Blind ELIZABETH STROUT I, Buffalo VAUHINI VARA Birdsong from the Radio ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN For author interviews, photos, and more, go to www.ohenryprizestories.com |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Not Go Away Is My Name Alberto Ríos, 2020-05-12 Resistance and persistence collide in Alberto Rios’s sixteenth book, Not Go Away Is My Name, a book about past and present, changing and unchanging, letting go and holding on. The borderline between Mexico and the U.S. looms large, and Ríos sheds light on and challenges our sensory experiences of everyday objects. At the same time, family memories and stories of the Sonoron desert weave throughout as Ríos travels in duality: between places, between times, and between lives. In searching for and treasuring what ought to be remembered, Ríos creates an ode to family life, love and community, and realizes “All I can do is not go away. / Not go away is my name.” |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: I Swallow Turquoise for Courage Hershman R. John, 2007 ç?kÕid’daaÕ jini. The stories begin. In poems that exude the warmth of an afternoon in the southwestern sun, Hershman John draws readers into a world both familiar and utterly new. Raised on a reservation and in boarding schools, then educated at a state university, John writes as a contemporary Navajo poet. His is a new voiceÑone that understands life on both sides of the canyon that divides, but does not completely separate, the DinŽ people from their neighbors who live outside the reservation. His poetry draws freely from tribal myths and legends, and like its creator, it lives outside the reservation too. Perhaps that is why they seem so unspoiled, so sparkling. They are like gemstones that we have never seen. And we are dazzled. With their recurring images of sheep, coyotes, and crowsÑand an ever-present Navajo grandmotherÑthese poems carry echoes of an ancient time that seems to exist in parallel with our own. The people who live in them bear, as if woven strand by strand into their souls, the culture and traditions of the Glittering World. Although these poems are lush with imagery of sunbaked lands, they are never sentimental. Throughout this collection, the poetÕs voice is confident, assured, and engaged with life in a messy world. It is a world in which animated spirits dwell comfortably with modern machinery, where the spiritual resides with the all-too-human. This is a welcoming universe. It invites us to enter, to linger, to savor, and to learn. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Magic City Jewell Parker Rhodes, 2021-05-04 A compelling page-turner that will keep readers hoping against hope that everything will somehow, magically, turn out for the best. — Atlanta Journal-Constitution With a new Afterword from the author reflecting on the 100th anniversary of one of the most heinous tragedies in American history—the 1921 burning of Greenwood, an affluent black section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, known as the Negro Wall Street—Jewell Parker Rhodes’ powerful and unforgettable novel of racism, vigilantism, and injustice, weaves history, mysticism, and murder into a harrowing tale of dreams and violence gone awry. Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921. A white woman and a black man are alone in an elevator. Suddenly, the woman screams, the man flees, and the chase to capture and lynch him begins. When Joe Samuels, a young Black man with dreams of becoming the next Houdini, is accused of rape, he must perform his greatest escape by eluding a bloodthirsty mob. Meanwhile, Mary Keane, the white, motherless daughter of a farmer who wants to marry her off to the farmhand who viciously raped her, must find the courage to help exonerate the man she accused with her panicked cry. Magic City evokes one of the darkest chapters of twentieth century, Jim Crow America, painting an intimate portrait of the heroic but doomed stand that pitted the National Guard against a small band of black men determined to defend the prosperous town they had built. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods Matt Bell, 2013 A newly-wed couple escape a busy confusion of their homeland for a distant and almost uninhabited lakeshore. They plan to lead a simple life there, fishing the lake, trapping the nearby woods and building a house upon the dirt between where they can raise a family. But as their every pregnancy fails, the child-obsessed husband begins to rage at this new world: the song-spun objects somehow created by his wife's beautiful singing voice, the giant and sentient bear that rules the beasts of the woods... A powerful exploration of the limits of parenthood and marriage. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, Robert O'Clair, 2003 A new revision of the classic anthology presents 195 poets and 1,596 poems representing the range of English language modern and contemporary poetry. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Residue Years Mitchell S. Jackson, 2013-08-20 Winner Whiting Writers' Award Winner Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction Finalist for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize Finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Mitchell S. Jackson grew up black in a neglected neighborhood in America's whitest city, Portland, Oregon. In the '90s, those streets and beyond had fallen under the shadow of crack cocaine and its familiar mayhem. In his commanding autobiographical novel, Mitchell writes what it was to come of age in that time and place, with a break-out voice that's nothing less than extraordinary. The Residue Years switches between the perspectives of a young man, Champ, and his mother, Grace. Grace is just out of a drug treatment program, trying to stay clean and get her kids back. Champ is trying to do right by his mom and younger brothers, and dreams of reclaiming the only home he and his family have ever shared. But selling crack is the only sure way he knows to achieve his dream. In this world of few options and little opportunity, where love is your strength and your weakness, this family fights for family and against what tears one apart. Honest in its portrayal, with cadences that dazzle, The Residue Years signals the arrival of a writer set to awe. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Survival Math Mitchell Jackson, 2020-02-04 “A vibrant memoir of race, violence, family, and manhood…a virtuosic wail of a book” (The Boston Globe), Survival Math calculates how award-winning author Mitchell S. Jackson survived the Portland, Oregon, of his youth. This “spellbinding” (NPR) book explores gangs and guns, near-death experiences, sex work, masculinity, composite fathers, the concept of “hustle,” and the destructive power of addiction—all framed within the story of Mitchell Jackson, his family, and his community. Lauded for its breathtaking pace, its tender portrayals, its stark candor, and its luminous style, Survival Math reveals on every page the searching intellect and originality of its author. The primary narrative, focused on understanding the antecedents of Jackson’s family’s experience, is complemented by survivor files, which feature photographs and riveting short narratives of several of Jackson’s male relatives. “A vulnerable, sobering look at Jackson’s life and beyond, in all its tragedies, burdens, and faults” (San Francisco Chronicle), the sum of Survival Math’s parts is a highly original whole, one that reflects on the exigencies—over generations—that have shaped the lives of so many disenfranchised Americans. “Both poetic and brutally honest” (Salon), Mitchell S. Jackson’s nonfiction debut is as essential as it is beautiful, as real as it is artful, a singular achievement, not to be missed. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Atmospherians Isle McElroy, 2022-02-08 Sasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high-profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an abusive troll has taken a horrifying turn, and now she's at rock bottom: canceled and doxxed online, isolated in her apartment while men's rights protestors rage outside. Sasha confides in her oldest childhood friend, Dyson--a failed actor with a history of body issues--who hatches a plan for her to restore her reputation by becoming the face of his new business venture, The Atmosphere: a rehabilitation community for men.-- |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Reeling Through Life Tara Ison, 2015-01-01 Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love. Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style. Rather than being a means of escape or object of mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a more engaging form of art, a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities. A way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at one popular art form and how it has influenced our identities in provocative and important ways. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Pictures of You Caroline Leavitt, 2011-01-25 A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “Magically written, heartbreakingly honest.” —Jodi Picoult Leavitt’s new novel, Days of Wonder, is coming April 23, 2024. Pre-order now! Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why. As these three lives intersect, the book asks, How well do we really know those we love—and how do we forgive the unforgivable? |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: A Tree or a Person or a Wall: Stories Matt Bell, 2016-09-13 Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, lingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Human Interest Valerie Bandura, 2017 Poetry. Women's Studies. Bandura's poems make me cry. They reach into my pithy little heart and rip it out of my chest. She writes about Black Sabbath and guns and children and bad fathers and nutty sisters and Facebook and beautiful husbands and none of the language wants to pretend. She's saying Come here. Come closer. I want to whisper something in your ear. But, it's the ear of the world, of humanity.--Matthew Lipmann |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: How to Wrestle a Girl Venita Blackburn, 2021-09-07 A Paris Review Staff Pick and an Amazon Editors' Pick. Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and longlisted for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Bold, witty, ominous and vulnerable . . . How to Wrestle a Girl shines in its propensity to magnify small moments, challenge our presumptions and dissect the beauty, danger and wonder of girlhood. --The New York Times Book Review Hilarious, tough, and tender stories from a farseeing star on the rise Venita Blackburn’s characters bully and suffer, spit and tease, mope and blame. They’re hyperaware of their bodies and fiercely observant, fending off the failures and advances of adults with indifferent ease. In “Biology Class,” they torment a teacher to the point of near insanity, while in “Bear Bear HarvestTM,” they prepare to sell their excess fat and skin for food processing. Stark and sharp, hilarious and ominous, these pieces are scabbed, bruised, and prone to scarring. Many of the stories, set in Southern California, follow a teenage girl in the aftermath of her beloved father’s death and capture her sister’s and mother’s encounters with men of all ages, as well as the girl’s budding attraction to her best friend, Esperanza. In and out of school, participating in wrestling and softball, attending church with her hysterically complicated family, and dominating boys in arm wrestling, she grapples with her burgeoning queerness and her emerging body, becoming wary of clarity rather than hoping for it. A rising star, Blackburn is a trailblazing stylist, and in How to Wrestle a Girl she masterfully shakes loose a vision of girlhood that is raw, vulnerable, and never at ease. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Black Jesus and Other Superheroes Venita Blackburn, 2017-09 2018 PEN America Literary Award Winner–Los Angeles Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, Black Jesus and Other Superheroes chronicles ordinary people achieving vivid extrasensory perception while under extreme pain. The stories tumble into a universe of the jaded and the hopeful, in which men and women burdened with unwieldy and undesirable superhuman abilities are nonetheless resilient in subtle and startling ways. Venita Blackburn's characters hurl themselves toward the inevitable fates they might rather wish away. Their stories play with magic without the sparkle, glaring at the internal machinations of the human spirit. Fragile symbols for things such as race, sexuality, and love are lifted, decorated, and exposed to scrutiny and awe like so many ruins of our imagination. Through it all Blackburn’s characters stumble along currents of language both thoughtful and hilarious. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: A Small Story about the Sky Alberto Ríos, 2016-06-13 Rios evokes the mysterious and unexpected forces that dwell inside the familiar.—The Washington Post Ríos delivers another stunning book of poems, rich in impeccable metaphors, that revel in the ordinariness of morning coffee and the crackle of thunderous desert storms. In one sonnet, Ríos addresses injustice in the borderlands, capturing with mathematical precision the everyday struggles that many migrants face—'The border is an equation in search of an equals sign.' A series of sonnets about desert flora abounds with fantastic, magical imagery—'Bougainvilleas do not bloom—they bleed' and 'Apricots are eggs laid in trees by invisible golden hens.' Likewise, Ríos's bestiary sonnets overflow with inimitable similes, worthy of a book unto themselves—'Minnows are where a river’s leg has fallen asleep' and 'Gnats are sneezes still flying around.' This robust volume is the perfect place to start for readers new to Ríos and a prize for seasoned fans.—Booklist In his thirteenth book, Alberto Rios casts an intense desert light on the rich stories unfolding along the Mexico-US border. Peppered with Spanish and touches of magical realism, ordinary life and its simple props—morning showers, spilled birdseed, winter lemons—becomes an exploration of mortality and humanity, and the many possibilities of how lives might yet be lived. Mad Honey Made from magnificent rhododendron, poisonous rhododendron, Very difficult-to-pronounce rhododendron—whatever Rhododendron even is—I would have to look it up myself, This word sounding puffed up, peacocky with its Indianapolisly-long spelling, all those letters moving in and out. But the plant itself, the plant and the bees that find it: The bees see in its purple flower, first, a purple flower. They do not spell it. They do not live in fear of quizzes, Purple offering what it has to offer, unapologetic, without further Definition, purple irresistible to the artist's and to the bee's eye— Who can blame either one this first-grade impulse toward love? Purple, always wearing something low-cut . . . Alberto Rios is the Poet Laureate of Arizona and host of the PBS program Books & Co. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for his poetry volume The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. He teaches at Arizona State University and lives in Chandler, Arizona. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Our Dreams Might Align Dana Diehl, 2016-12-01 Dana Diehl's debut short story collection, Our Dreams Might Align, is loss and longing, is magic and what's beyond what we can see. Each story breathes into existence a new, magical world. A man makes snakes fall in love, girls prepare for the apocalypse, a couple adopts a pair of baby Komodo dragons, a husband transcends reality. These stories transport readers from the Black Forest of Germany to the rugged Isle of Skye to the depths of the ocean and deep space, all the while united by a sense of awe and deep curiosity for the natural world and our place within it. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts Matt Bell, 2022-03-08 They say writing is rewriting. So why does the second part get such short shrift? Refuse To Be Done will guide you through every step of the novel writing process, from getting started on those first pages to the last tips for making your final draft even tighter and stronger. From lauded writer and teacher Matt Bell, Refuse to Be Done is encouraging and intensely practical, focusing always on specific rewriting tasks, techniques, and activities for every stage of the process. You won’t find bromides here about the “the writing Muse.” Instead, Bell breaks down the writing process in three sections. In the first, Bell shares a bounty of tactics, all meant to push you through the initial conception and get words on the page. The second focuses on reworking the narrative through outlining, modeling, and rewriting. The third and final section offers a layered approach to polishing through a checklist of operations, breaking the daunting project of final revisions into many small, achievable tasks. Whether you are a first time novelist or a veteran writer, you will find an abundance of strategies here to help motivate you and shake up your revision process, allowing you to approach your work, day after day and month after month, with fresh eyes and sharp new tools. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Atom City Sara Sams, 2021-05-14 Sara Sams' Atom City opens with a caution, But Think, Are You Authorized to Tell It. In poems of sharp wit and riveting investigation, tell it she does! Aware of the irony of grow[ing] up happy / in a town that knitted / mushroom clouds, Sams documents government duplicity and the revisionist history of developing the atomic bomb. The volume is punctuated by poems rich in details of her Appalachian roots and a magnificent series about local legend Prophet John, who foresaw the bomb a century ago. Exploratory poems from the vast archive of the atoms are tempered by tender poems of loss and love. This is a bold debut by a major new poet. -Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth Sara Sams' Atom City shows us what violence and invisible interiority and tenderness is at the core of the American hometown. At the core of the American superpower myth. At the core of American exceptionalism, and uranium, and the atom, itself-which is at the core of everything. When hometown is intertwined with the mushroom cloud, when childhood is entangled with the physicist, Sams teaches us that you can feel your fibers loosen, too-then fall, / after standing years, involuntarily, on end. I will never think of the bomb, or America, the same way again, after reading this. -Sarah Vap, author of Viability Each poem Sara Sams writes is a reckoning with man-made devastation. In her brilliant debut collection, she proves herself to be a poet of immense personal and historical depth as she investigates complicity in one of history's most frightening discoveries: the atomic bomb. The result is a haunting and intimate conversation about language and truth. -Diana Marie Delgado, author of Tracing the Horse, a New York Times Noteworthy Pick |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Shakespeare and Language Catherine M. S. Alexander, 2004-09-30 Publisher Description |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Sky is Yours Chandler Klang Smith, 2018 Navigating their burned-out, futuristic city home under constant threat from a pair of dragons circling the skies, three young people are forced to flee and confront challenges ranging from fire and conspiracies to taboo drugs and dragon-worshippers. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Water Knife Paolo Bacigalupi, 2016-04-05 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A fresh, genre-bending thriller” (Los Angeles Times) set in the near future when water is scarce and a spy, a hardened journalist and a young Texas migrant find themselves pawns in a corrupt game. Think Chinatown meets Mad Max. NPR, All Things Considered In the near future, the Colorado River has dwindled to a trickle. Detective, assassin, and spy, Angel Velasquez “cuts” water for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, ensuring that its lush arcology developments can bloom in Las Vegas. When rumors of a game-changing water source surface in Phoenix, Angel is sent south, hunting for answers that seem to evaporate as the heat index soars and the landscape becomes more and more oppressive. There, he encounters Lucy Monroe, a hardened journalist with her own agenda, and Maria Villarosa, a young Texas migrant, who dreams of escaping north. As bodies begin to pile up, the three find themselves pawns in a game far bigger and more corrupt than they could have imagined, and when water is more valuable than gold, alliances shift like sand, and the only truth in the desert is that someone will have to bleed if anyone hopes to drink. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Loudermilk Lucy Ives, 2019-05-07 This New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, is hilarious . . . a riotous success. Equal parts campus novel, buddy comedy and meditation on art-making under late capitalism, the novel is a hugely funny portrait of an egomaniac and his nebbish best friend (The Washington Post). It’s the end of summer 2003. George W. Bush has recently declared the mission in Iraq accomplished, the unemployment rate is at its highest in years, and Martha Stewart has just been indicted for insider trading. Meanwhile, somewhere in the Midwest, Troy Augustus Loudermilk (fair-haired, statuesque, charismatic) and his companion Harry Rego (definitely none of those things) step out of a silver Land Cruiser and onto the campus of The Seminars, America’s most prestigious creative writing program, to which Loudermilk has recently been accepted for his excellence in poetry. Loudermilk, however, has never written a poem in his life. Wickedly entertaining, beguiling, layered, and sly, Loudermilk is a social novel for our time: a comedy of errors that deftly examines class, gender, and inheritance, and subverts our pieties about literature, authorship, art making, and the institutions that sustain them. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Capirotada Alberto Alvaro Ríos, 1999-08-01 Capirotada, Mexican bread pudding, is a mysterious mixture of prunes, peanuts, white bread, raisins, milk, quesadilla cheese, butter, cinnamon and cloves, Old World sugar--all this, writes Alberto Rios, and things people will not tell you. Like its Mexican namesake, this memoir is a rich melange, stirring together Rios's memories of family, neighbors, friends, and secrets from his youth in the two Nogaleses--in Arizona and through the open gate into Mexico. The vignettes in this memoir are not loud or fast. Yet like all of Rios's writing they are singular. Here is the story about a rickety magician, his chicken, and a group of little boys, but who plays a trick on whom? The story about the flying dancers and mortality. About going to the dentist in Mexico because it is cheaper, and maybe dangerous. About a British woman who sets out on a ship for America with the faith her Mexican GI will be waiting for her in Salt Lake City. And about the grown son who looks at his father and understands how he must ovide for his own boy. This book's uncommon offering is how it stops to address the quiet, the overlooked, the every day side of growing up. Capirotada is not about prison, or famous heroes. It is instead about the middle, which is often the most interesting place to find news. Capirotada was selected as the 2009 ONEBOOKAZ by the Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: A Good Map of All Things Alberto Álvaro Ríos, 2020-10-27 In Alberto Álvaro Ríos’s new picaresque novel, momentous adventure and quiet connection brings twenty people to life in a small town in northern Mexico. A Good Map of All Things is home to characters whose lives are interwoven but whose stories are their own, adding warmth and humor to this continually surprising communal narrative. The stories take place in the mid-twentieth century, in the high desert near the border—a stretch of land generally referred to as the Pimería Alta—an ancient passage through the desert that connected the territory of Tucson in the north and Guaymas and Hermosillo in the south. The United States is off in the distance, a little difficult to see, and, in the middle of the century, not the only thing to think about. Mexico City is somewhere to the south, but nobody can say where and nobody has ever seen it. Ríos has created a whimsical yet familiar town, where brightly unique characters love fiercely and nurture those around them. The people in A Good Map of All Things have secrets and fears, successes and happiness, winters and summers. They are people who do not make the news, but who are living their lives for the long haul, without lotteries or easy answers or particular luck. Theirs is the everyday, with its small but meaningful joy. Whether your heart belongs to a small town in Mexico or a bustling metropolis, Alberto Álvaro Ríos has crafted a book that is overflowing with comfort, warmth, and the familiar embrace of a tightly woven community. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Annus Mirabilis Sally Ball, 2005 Poetry. Sally Ball's first collection of poems is something of conversations and relationships-the connections and differences between personal life and the natural world, the Zen-like attention to suffering and knowledge. This is a work of intellectual and artistic inquiry, peeling away the delusion that something can explain our mortality and our existence. A work of scientific theory and probing questions that leave us with only one real explanation: luck. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: How to Say Babylon Safiya Sinclair, 2023-10-03 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner A New York Times Notable Book A Read with Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! A Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, Shelf Awareness, Goodreads, Esquire, The Atlantic, NPR, and Barack Obama With echoes of Educated and Born a Crime, How to Say Babylon is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet. Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience. In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them. How to Say Babylon is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, How to Say Babylon is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Yellow Boat David Saar, 1997 A young boy concludes his bedtime ritual pretending to be a yellow boat sailing up to the sun. |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: Electric Deserts Amber McCrary, 2020-05 |
| arizona state mfa creative writing: The Wind Shifts Francisco Arag—n, 2007 Authors included: Rosa Alcalá, Franciso Aragón, Naomi Ayala, Richard Blanco, Brenda Cárdenas, Albino Carrillo, Steven Cordova, Eduardo C. Corral, David Dominguez, John Olivares Espinoza, Gina Franco, Venessa Maria Engel-Fuentes, Kevin A. González, David Hernandez, Scott Inguito, Sheryl Luna, Carl Marcum, María Meléndez, Carolina Monsivais, Adela Najarro, Urayoán Noel, Deborah Parédez, Emmy Pérez, Paul Martínez Pompa, Lidia Torres. |
Official Travel & Tourism Website | Visit Arizona
Plan the perfect vacation with Arizona's official travel guide. Discover inspiring things to do from outdoor fun to arts and culture, events, and culinary hot spots. Your Arizona adventure starts …
La vida es mejor en chanclas | Visit Arizona
Además de su grandeza, Arizona tiene una historia milenaria, definida por los nativos americanos, pero también por grandes aventureros y sus variados paisajes. Pero Arizona es …
Travel Guide | Visit Arizona
Plan your Arizona vacation with the Official State Travel Guide – available in print, electronically, or both.
Must See | Visit Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Places - Visit Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Arizona Maps | Visit Arizona
Looking for maps of specific places or experiences in Arizona? Check out our area maps below, with handy PDF versions you can print and take on the go as you explore the Grand Canyon …
Plan Your AZ Trip - Visit Arizona
Looking for a quick way to plan your trip to Arizona? You've come to the right spot. From travel tips to weather forecasts and articles about Arizona's destinations, you'll find just what you …
Here You Are in Arizona | Visit Arizona
Combine outdoor exploration and urban culture when you visit Arizona. Solo travellers or groups can book experienced adventure companies to tour some of Arizona's most beautiful …
Willkommen in Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Les 10 plus belles choses à faire en Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Official Travel & Tourism Website | Visit Arizona
Plan the perfect vacation with Arizona's official travel guide. Discover inspiring things to do from outdoor fun to arts and culture, events, and culinary hot spots. Your Arizona adventure starts …
La vida es mejor en chanclas | Visit Arizona
Además de su grandeza, Arizona tiene una historia milenaria, definida por los nativos americanos, pero también por grandes aventureros y sus variados paisajes. Pero Arizona es …
Travel Guide | Visit Arizona
Plan your Arizona vacation with the Official State Travel Guide – available in print, electronically, or both.
Must See | Visit Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Places - Visit Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Arizona Maps | Visit Arizona
Looking for maps of specific places or experiences in Arizona? Check out our area maps below, with handy PDF versions you can print and take on the go as you explore the Grand Canyon …
Plan Your AZ Trip - Visit Arizona
Looking for a quick way to plan your trip to Arizona? You've come to the right spot. From travel tips to weather forecasts and articles about Arizona's destinations, you'll find just what you …
Here You Are in Arizona | Visit Arizona
Combine outdoor exploration and urban culture when you visit Arizona. Solo travellers or groups can book experienced adventure companies to tour some of Arizona's most beautiful …
Willkommen in Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
Les 10 plus belles choses à faire en Arizona
From the abundance of Saguaro cactuses and unique wildlife in the Sonoran Desert to the high country and forests of the White Mountains to the breathtaking Grand Canyon, Arizona’s …
