An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selvesHonest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and naïve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voi...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A guide to the art of journaling—and a meditation on the central questions of life—by the bestselling author of Between Two Kingdoms, with contributions from Hanif Abdurraqib, Jon Batiste, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, George Saunders, and many more“The Book of Alchemy proves on every page that a creative response can be found in every moment of life—regardless of what is happening in the world.”—Eliz...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...

A simple guide to the transformative power of reading and writing poems, from two acclaimed spoken-word artists.How can a poem transform a life? Could poetry change the world? In this accessible volume, spoken-word stars Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley roll out the welcome mat and prove that poetry is for everyone. Whether lapsed poetry lovers, aspiring poets, or total novices, readers will learn to uncover verse in unexpected places, find their way through a poem w...

It's easy for people to write about their feelings in a journal. It's more difficult, however, to convert personal experiences into stories worthy of publication-fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. Filled with engaging exercises, Write from Life guides writers in identifying story-worthy material and transforming their raw material into finished pieces, through conquering fears associated with personal exposure, determining a story's focus, shaping the material into a cohesive whole,...

The National Book Award–winning author compiles a "thought-provoking volume" of essays by Joyce Carol Oates, Oliver Sacks, Jaquira Diaz and others ( Publishers Weekly).As Jonathan Franzen writes in his introduction, his main criterion for selecting The Best American Essays 2016 "was whether an author had taken a risk." The resulting volume showcases authorial risk in a variety of forms, from championing an unpopular opinion to the possibility of r...

"Packed with inspirational, useful, and thought-provoking essays on the craft of writing from some of the best writers around." — Minneapolis Star TribuneTeachers, exercises, mentors, critiques, humor, and inspiration: these form the fuel all writers need when they get down to work every day. For decades the Loft Literary Center has provided this fuel to an enormous community of writers. Views from the Loft brings together the collected wisdom of t...

A guidebook for beating the monotony of the everyday by purposefully cultivating the surprising joys that come from living an off-kilter lifeIt's all too easy to get caught up in the often monotonous nature of our day to day--moving from one rote task to the next, only to rinse and repeat the next day. Weirdness, however, is an easily accessible antidote to these feelings of languishing. The quirky, eccentric, and peculiar can take us out of our normal habits of th...

When we talk about hybrid literary genres, what do we mean? Unprecedented in both its scope and approach, Family Resemblance is the first anthology to explore the answer to that question in depth, providing craft essays and examples of hybrid forms by 43 distinguished authors. In this study of eight hybrid genres—including lyric essay, epistolary, poetic memoir, prose poetry, performative, short-form nonfiction, flash fiction, and pictures made of words

Finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ AnthologyFinalist for the 2021 Publishing Triangle Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant LiteratureA collection of formally inventive writing by trans poets against capital and empire.Editors Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel offer We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics as an experiment into how far literature, written from an identitarian standp...

This all-new book, by the co-author of Companion, invites you to discover and enjoy your poetic self.Inspired by the gratifying success of Companion, Kim Addonizio presents exciting new insights into the creative process, craft, and the lessons of her own creative subjects--love, loss, identity, community--are here, along with a heady variety of writing exercises (and innovative ways to use the Internet). Chapters on gender, race, and class challenge readers to ex...

Poetry: A Writers' Guide and Anthologyis a complete introduction to the art and craft of writing poetry. The authors map out more than 25 key elements of poetry including image, lyric, point of view, metaphor, and movement and use these elements as starting points for discussion questions and writing prompts. The book guides the reader through a range of poetic modes including:- Elegy- Found poems- Nocturne- Ode- Protest poems- Ars Poetic...