Afternoon Craft Conversation with Lisa Alvarez, October 17, 2012
Lisa Alvarez from MFA Program in Creative Writing on Vimeo.
"What can prose writers learn from poetry?"
What can prose writers learn from poetry? Often, too often, students focus primarily on their chosen genre whether through individual choice and/or institutional pressure. This talk will examine how developing a close relationship to poetry can teach prose writers about line, imagery, form and content in ways that invigorate and inspire. As Edward Hirsch has suggested, "fiction goes to poetry for the intensity of its use of language," as part of the making literature, "something that lasts in language."
Lisa Alvarez's stories and essays have most recently appeared in American Book Review, Faultline, Green Mountains Review and in the anthology Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America (Norton). Together with Alan Cheuse, she co-edited Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction (Chronicle Books). She is a professor of English at Irvine Valley College and for over ten years has co-directed the Writers Workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.
Afternoon Craft Conversation with giovanni singleton, September 12, 2012
Afternoon Craft Conversations with Giovanni Singleton from MFA Program in Creative Writing on Vimeo.
“AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper”
Sound, as in improvisation, acts upon images and text giving rise to harmonious constructions of silence. It comes down to the desire for liberation through exploring what words, in their essence, can do. The behearer and the beholder approach the world with an attitude of longing. The page is a canvas, a field, a mediation between human nature and the natural world. Writing occurs on and with trees. Knock on wood. What is spoken from the depths of a whisper or said in a scream?
giovanni singleton is a poet, teacher, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Ascension, winner of the eighty-first annual California Book Award for Poetry. She has been a fellow at Squaw Valley Writers Conference, Cave Canem, and the Napa Valley Writers Conference. Her work has appeared in VOLT, Callaloo, Angles of Ascent: a Norton anthology, and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America. singleton has taught at Saint Mary¹s College and Naropa University.
Gaelebration MFA Alumni and English Undergraduate Reading
Saturday, October 6, 1:00 pm, Cassin Student Union Patio and Fountain
Tapas Reading @ Gaelabration from MFA Program in Creative Writing on Vimeo.
Watch snippets from Gabi Reyes-Acosta, Holden Altaffer, Candace Eros Diaz, Robert Andrew Pere, Casey McAlduff, Brenna McNa, Delia Neyr, Christine O'Brien, Mick Sherer, and Juan Alvarado Valdivia
First Year Experience Reading with Lysley Tenorio
Wednesday, October 10, 7:30 p.m., Soda Center, Moraga Room
Creative Writing Reading Series with Lysley Tenorio from MFA Program in Creative Writing on Vimeo.
LYSLEY TENORIO’s debut collection of stories, Monstress, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins. A Whiting Writer’s Award winner and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His stories have appeared in The Best New American Voices, The Atlantic, The Chicago Tribune, and Pushcart Prize anthologies, among others. Born in the Philippines, Lysley currently lives in San Francisco, and is an Asssociate Professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of CA.
More Writers & Words Videos Coming Soon:
MFA Sesquicentennial Reading with Tom Meschery and Robert Hass
Afternoon Craft Conversation with Jimmye Hillman
Creative Writing Reading Series with Michael Palmer and Linda Spalding
