November 2019 
I Have Been on a Fried Chicken Journey: The 2019 AWP Annual Conference & Bookfair Keynote Address
Colson Whitehead
I like to write eight pages a week. That’s what I’ve figured out is a nice productive week for me. It can be any combination—Monday and Tuesday and Sunday, Thursday and Friday and Saturday. Maybe I spend all week thinking up baroque revenge fantasies about people who have wronged me and I have to catch up on the weekend. But eight pages—that adds up.
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Within Two Cultures, With Two Languages: An Interview with Margarita Engle
Padma Venkatraman
I do think both languages influence me now because I live surrounded by English, while continually reading poetry written in Spanish from the many countries of Latin America, as well as Spanglish verses by US Latinos.
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Tell Don’t Show: On Pseudo-statement
Christopher Kempf
The narrative is a compelling one, not least of all for its participation in the vaunted tradition of excoriating the New Criticism.
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Une Femme Du Monde and a Life in Letters: An Interview with Patricia Spears Jones
Lauren K. Alleyne
I grew up in a neighborhood where people knew who I was, where I was from, who my mama was. And if anything happened, they would definitely let somebody know. I was not invisible. People across the street from me were not invisible. Black people are not invisible. I hate that phrase.
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Foundational Narrative Design
Andy Graff
Foundational Narrative Design (FND) is the groundwork of information that is presented in any story to establish a set of guidelines and principles that a story will continue around.
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The Diagram Still Sketched on the Wind: Self-Portrait Poems and the Poem as Self-Portrait
Dante Di Stefano
The contemporary American self-portrait poem has little to do with reproducing physical similitude.
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Against Exclusion
Caleb Ajinomoh
It is hard to judge how monumental Sontag would have been, had her fiction been anywhere as successful as her essays. But one imagines were it so, few anthologies of fiction in America would be printed without her name in it.
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Suggested Teaching Guide for “A Woman Alone in a Room Realizing Something” by Alice Mattison
Jeannine Ouellette
Effective stories include action and events, but the inner life is fascinating, as well. How can interior stories—those exploring the life of the mind—provide enough forward momentum to keep us reading?
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