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AWP provides community, opportunities, ideas, news, and advocacy for writers and teachers of writing.

April 2021

Beyond the Familiar Landscape of Violence: A Conversation with Philip Metres

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Milena Williamson
“Humans are better at surviving than loving, but perhaps poems can widen the circle of that love.”

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Intersections in Canadian and American Indian Fiction

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Erika T. Wurth
“However, in many ways, in looking at contemporary Native literature in the United States, and in Canada—the difference is still a puzzle.”

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SUGGESTED TEACHING GUIDE for “That’s Interesting” by Debra Spark

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Tanya Perkins
"Often students come to creative writing because they’ve found great pleasure in journaling or writing stories, with only themselves or perhaps a close family member as reader"

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Following the Thread: A Dialogue

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Bonnie Friedman & Kyoko Mori
“Although essays are not plotdriven, portraying people and places requires narrative and description—the two modes of writing that most composition classes present as basic building blocks.”

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Architecture, Audience, & the Invasions of the World: A Conversation with Rebecca Makkai

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Stephanie Vanderslice
“…if you take workshop after workshop again and again, you learn that people will read what you write, which is not usually the case in the world. In the world you have to absolutely woo and earn an audience.”

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What Is This Thing?: The Paragraph as Literary Nexus and an Argument for the Prose Poem

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Gerry LaFemina
“It can be argued that Aristotle was the first to define literary genres, but right now I’m thinking about Plato, and his criticism of the poets (and other artists) for making copies of copies of an ideal.”

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Poetry Grabbed Me by the Collar: An Interview with Eli Clare

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Kathi Wolfe
“All these pieces of my identity—my whiteness, my disability, my childhood as tomboy girl, my surviving of family violence, my love of the natural world, being raised by upwardly mobile working-class parents in a poor backwoods town, coming out first as queer and then as trans—have shaped the stories I’m drawn to tell and how I tell them.”

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On Inaugural Poet—Amanda Gorman

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E. Ethelbert Miller
“Our nation divided once again. Our soldiers standing before us. She is our Whitman now, our witness to our ugliness, but believing in our beauty.”

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Nonfiction/Nonbinary Literary Identities: An Investigation of Contemporary Writers Queering Gen(der/re) in America

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Chachi Hauser
“This genre grants me power, giving me authority over the truth, at least my truth, and for some reason this scares me, maybe because my own truth seems murky even to me.”

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