Author: Chuy Renteria
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781732420601
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Untold stories from the American heartland of migration, belonging, and home.

Author: Z Publishing
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781727099201
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
Our Emerging Writers publications are part of an experimental series designed to match readers looking for new voices with up-and-coming authors looking to widen their reader base. We like to refer to publications in this series as "sampler platters" of writers and genres, such that readers can quickly and efficiently discover talented authors that they may otherwise have never heard of as well as compelling genres, topics, and themes they may never have given a shot before. In Iowa's Emerging Writers: An Anthology, Iowa's most promising up-and-coming authors have the chance to share their own words. Covering a wide array of genres and topics, these young talents will amaze you. Containing one essay per writer, this anthology is a compelling introduction to the great wordsmiths of tomorrow.

Author: Eric Olsen
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing Inc.
ISBN: 160239735X
Category : House & Home
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
"It was the best teaching-writing job I ever had." --John...

Author: Eric Bennett
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383729
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could. Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany. Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.

Author: Jamel Brinkley
Publisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555979955
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

Author: Chuy Renteria
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388062
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Most agree that West Liberty is a special place. The first majority Hispanic town in Iowa, it has been covered by media giants such as Reuters, Telemundo, NBC, and ESPN. But Chuy Renteria and his friends grew up in the space between these news stories, where a more complicated West Liberty awaits. We Heard It When We Were Young tells the story of a young boy, first-generation Mexican American, who is torn between cultures: between immigrant parents trying to acclimate to midwestern life and a town that is, by turns, supportive and disturbingly antagonistic. Renteria looks past the public celebrations of diversity to dive into the private tensions of a community reflecting the changing American landscape. There are culture clashes, breakdancing battles, fistfights, quinceañeras, vandalism, adventures on bicycles, and souped-up lowriders, all set to an early 2000s soundtrack. Renteria and his friends struggle to find their identities and reckon with intergenerational trauma and racism in a town trying to do the same. A humorous and poignant reflection on coming of age, We Heard It When We Were Young puts its finger on a particular cultural moment at the turn of the millennium.

Author: Yiyun Li
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0307430510
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose. “Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations. These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.

Author: Cara Blue Adams
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609388143
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
The linked stories in Cara Blue Adams’s precise and observant collection offer elegantly constructed glimpses of the life of Kate, a young woman from rural New England, moving between her childhood in the countryside of Vermont and her twenties and thirties in the northeast, southwest, and South in pursuit of a vocation, first as a research scientist and later as a writer. Place is a palpable presence: Boston in winter, Maine in summer, Virginia’s lush hillsides, the open New Mexico sky. Along the way, we meet Kate’s difficult bohemian mother and younger sister, her privileged college roommate, and the various men Kate dates as she struggles to define what she wants from the world on her own terms. Wryly funny and shot through with surprising flashes of anger, these smart, dreamy, searching stories show us a young woman grappling with social class, gender, ambition, violence, and the distance between longing and having.

Author: Stephen Wilbers
Publisher: Iowa City : University of Iowa Press
ISBN:
Category : Creative writing
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
Tracing the evolution of the writer's workshop, Wilbers depicts it as having roots in the midwestern regionalist literary movement of the late nineteenth century and in the university's writer's clubs of the same period. The quirky personalities of the individuals who contributed to its growth are revealed as also the pros and cons of students "learning" to write in an academic situation.

Author: David O. Dowling
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300215843
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers' Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty As the world's preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers' Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the "workshop" method of classroom peer criticism. Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program--such as Flannery O'Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson--David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers' Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.