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“I think the books that I wish I’d written are all super personal books where the person manages to metabolize their personal experience into something more universal,” says Elif Batuman in this interview for The Graham Norton Book Club podcast about first books read, books to be jealous of, and books to recommend. A Q&A with Batuman by Porochista Khakpour is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Two University of Baltimore MFA students founded the small press that publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid work, and as well as a podcast and literary magazine.
“Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo? A dream?” In this animated TED-Ed lesson by Melissa Kovacs, the poetic form is analyzed through famous speeches, song lyrics, and tweets.
In a profile of Tracy K. Smith by Renée H. Shea, published in the March/April 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet discusses the “shifting subjectivities” she discovered while writing her memoir, Ordinary Light (Knopf, 2015), in which she includes stories from her childhood. “Tracy the citizen was allowed to engage with these private stories, just as Tracy the mother was allowed in at times,” says Smith. Consider two identities that you hold, then write a poem from one of these perspectives. What is left out, and what is let in?
“To be a writer, the best thing someone can do, in my opinion, is read. Read everything.” —Eloisa Amezcua, author of Fighting Is Like a Wife
