“The mosquito knows full well, small as he is / he’s a beast of prey,” writes D. H. Lawrence in his 1929 poem “The Mosquito Knows,” recently published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series. “But after all / he only takes his bellyful, / he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.” In this five-line verse, Lawrence presents a pithy portrait of an insect and then points the mirror at human behavior, the mosquito becoming a more sympathetic figure when pitted against human greed. Compose a series of miniscule poems that each revolve around an insect. Explore different facets of the bug, including how they might be irritating or harmful to people, and the ways in which their lives contrast surprisingly with human tendencies.

In an interview published in the Paris Review’s summer 2026 issue for their “Art of Fiction” series, Jeremy Tiang speaks to Yan Lianke, noting that throughout the course of their conversations, the author would “slip into the third person, as if describing himself as a character in his fiction, or sometimes into the second person, as if addressing his past self.” This week, write a personal essay about the city, town, or region where you grew up and your experiences there. Experiment with slipping between different points of view while still retaining your personal perspective. You might decide to start in the first person, and then address your past self in the second, before zooming further out into third person, or toggle multiple times between narrative points-of-view as befits the sense of distance you desire.

The comedy horror television series Widow’s Bay begins with the mayor of a small New England island town attempting to boost tourism and presenting the locale in a positive light to a visiting reporter of a major newspaper outlet. Despite the mayor’s efforts to detract attention from the town’s history of unusual occurrences, corroborating local residents’ warnings that the island is cursed and haunted, an arrival of thick fog brings present danger and terror that cannot be ignored. Write a short story that revolves around a group of people whose competing interests are illuminated when an outsider enters the picture. First, spend some time establishing the nuances of your characters’ relationships: Are there rivalries or unresolved conflicts from the past? How does the outsider create a disruption in your characters’ routines and expectations?

“Let America be America again. / Let it be the dream it used to be. / Let it be the pioneer on the plain / Seeking a home where he himself is free. // (America never was America to me.)” Written in 1935, Langston Hughes’s poem “Let America Be America Again” begins with a stanza of lines that seems to wish for a bygone era of the country, with its ideas of pioneering and freedom, but follows with a line in parentheticals that clarifies and redefines that notion of America from the speaker’s point of view. The poem’s next two stanzas follow this form with lines in parentheticals, the last one stating: “There’s never been equality for me, / Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.” This week, compose a poem that begins with the title of Hughes’s poem as your first line. Throughout your poem, use parentheticals to illuminate how some of your own ideas and experiences stand in tension with the country’s founding ideals.

In “The Tally,” an essay by Anne Enright recently published in the New Yorker, the author thinks back on a childhood memory in which her mother returned to a grocery store to settle the difference because she had been undercharged for a Christmas turkey. Enright explores her feelings of indignation at her family’s morality in the face of “corporate interest” and “predatory capitalism,” but then concludes that “integrity is also a way to hold the self together” and that “honesty may be a one-sided contract with the world, but it is the only side that we can control.” Write a personal essay that reflects on how your own stances around honesty and integrity have been shaped by how you were raised and what your family valued. How has your point of view on honesty evolved over the years, whether maintaining consistency or broadening to a more open-minded flexibility?