In his previous writing guide, This Year You Write Your Novel (Little, Brown, 2007), the author of more than fifty critically acclaimed books offered the basic tools and practical advice needed to write a novel in a single year. In this conversationa

By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narrative poem that moves with

IF I conducted a brutal assessment of my reading habits—something I am not eager to do—the results would show that I spend an alarming percentage of my time rereading the same book: the 1965 novel Stoner by John Williams. As a reader and part-time bo

JAKE SKEETS’S EYES BOTTLE DARK WITH A MOUTHFUL OF FLOWERS THE locals keep telling me that the stormy weather is unusual for this time of year but that the rain is a welcome change from last year’s dry spell. The glorious Albuquerque sky is overcast,

Academy of American Poets A prize of $5,000, publication by Gray-wolf Press, and a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, is given annually for a poetry collection by a poet who has not published a book of poems in a sta

Alice James Books Rosebud Ben-Oni of New York City won the 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery. She received $2,000, and her book will be published by Alice James Books in March 2021. Jacques Rancourt of Redwood City, Calif

HERE’S a story. In college I entered the spring semester of my freshman year on academic probation. There wasn’t one reason this happened. There were many. I had signed up for a computer science class called Digital Security with no programming knowl

ALLPOETRY.COM—Join the largest poetry community, more than 500,000 poets strong. From beginners to experts, get friendly encouragement and detailed critiques when you’re ready. No-fee contests, $50 cash prizes, active discussion forums, and join our

A.I.R. Studio Paducah offers residencies of two weeks to three months to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers in the Lower Town Arts District of Paducah, Kentucky. Residents are provided with a private apartment and studio space. T

I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE WRITING. PUT THAT ON MY HEADSTONE. There was this editor’s note, my remarks for an upcoming Poets & Writers Live event, thoughtful replies to the 117 e-mails I received a day earlier, a chapter about working with editors for the

IN THE mid-1990s, poet A. Van Jordan was pushing thirty and earning a solid, if not always scintillating, living by covering environmental issues for the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA) in Washington, D.C. In his five years there, Jordan mostly wrot

Can James Daunt save Barnes & Noble? This is the question on the minds of publishing insiders in the wake of news earlier this summer that a hedge fund had bought Barnes & Noble for $683 million and installed Daunt, who oversaw the successful turnaro

The spare, lyric poems in Andrea Cohen’s sixth collection, Nightshade, published by Four Way Books in September, play with dualities such as bitter and sweet, absence and presence, and silence and speaking. The title poem goes: “It trades in / poison

This fall Manuel Muñoz will become the new director of the creative writing program at the University of Arizona in Tucson, succeeding writer Ander Monson. Established in 1972, the fully funded program recently switched to a three-year model and offe