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News & Events

Congratulations to the 2013 RCTE Graduates!

Congratulations to all our 2013 RCTE graduates: Adrienne Crump, Jennifer Haley-Brown, Sarah Harris, Sara Howe, Londie Martin, Cruz Medina, Jessica Shumake, Mary Stroud, Elise Verzosa (Hurley), Jenna Vinson, and Cassie Wright. (not visible in this photo: Adela C. Licona, Ken McAllister and Cruz Medina.)

Teaching Award

Kudos to Elizabeth Labiner who won the 2013 Writing Program Johnnie Raye Harper Teaching Award.

Writing Program Fellowship winners

Three cheers for Ryan Winet and Pete Figler, both of whom are 2013 Writing Program Fellowship winners.

Assistant Editor for AZQ

Congratulations to Jordan Tracy who was selected by the Arizona Quarterly as the next Assistant Editor for 2013-2014.

Bookshelf

Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing by Damian Baca

Conventional scholarship on written communication positions the Western alphabet as a precondition for literacy. Thus, pictographic, non-verbal writing practices of Mesoamerica remain obscured by representations of lettered speech. This book examines how contemporary Mestiz@ scripts challenge alphabetic dominance, thereby undermining the colonized territories of "writing." Strategic weavings of Aztec and European inscription systems not only promote historically-grounded accounts of how...

The Fallen Sky by Chris Cokinos

“Christopher Cokinos goes from pole to pole in his search for the bits of cosmos that fall onto the Earth, and the remarkable people who collect and study them. He is a natural philosopher and gifted writer who sprinkles his own kind of stardust on every page. If you have ever wished upon a falling star, this is your chance to know just what is falling, where it comes from, what it tells us about our place in the universe – and what things in life are worth wishing for.”

Chet...

Keeping Faith by Fenton Johnson

WINNER OF A LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD AND A KENTUCKY LITERARY AWARD

In a resonant account of his spiritual quest, Fenton Johnson examines what it means for a skeptic to have and to keep faith. Exploring Western and Eastern monastic traditions, Johnson lives as a member of the community at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky and the branches of the San Francisco Zen Center. Ultimately his encounter with Buddhism brings him to a new understanding and embrace of Christianity....

A Palace of Pearls by Jane Miller

In this book-length sequence, animated by a confrontation with her dead father, Jane Miller meditates on home, love, war and the responsibility of the poet. A Palace of Pearls is inspired by one of the most spectacular civilizations in history, the Arab kingdom of Al-Andalus—a Middle Age civilization where architecture, science and art flourished and Christians, Jews, and Muslims lived in relative harmony. The reader roams through "rooms," encountering Greek, Judaic, and Roman mythology, and...

Rope by Alison Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming ’s fourth collection of poems follows the paths of imagination into meditations on salt, love, Hurricane Katrina, Greek myth, and the search for extraterrestrial life, all linked by the poet’s faith in art as an instrument for creating meaning, beauty, and continuity—virtues diminished by the velocity and violence of our historical moment. The final long poem “The Flight,” inspired by the works of A. R. Ammons, is a twenty-first century epic poised on the verge of our...

The Available World by Ander Monson

“[Ander Monson’s] poems celebrate defiant excess. In this land of scarcity, right-living involves using up what you have, where you have it; otherwise someone might wreck, steal, or use it and you might not get any. A carpe diem for obscure, doomed youth.”—Stephen Burt

Carter Clay: A Novel by Elizabeth Evans

Drunk, and driving a van down a Florida highway, Carter Clay, a Vietnam vet at loose ends, irrevocably shatters the lives of the Altiz family, killing Joe and seriously injuring his wife, Katherine, and their daughter, Jersey, in a hit-and-run accident. Horrified, Clay seeks redemption, while still concealing his culpability, by becoming the questionable caretaker of the two survivors' damaged lives--eventually imposing upon them the baggage of his past and his haphazard faith in God....

Genius Loci by Alison Deming

From a poet and essayist whose writing about nature has won her comparisons with Gary Snyder and Terry Tempest Williams comes a new collection that offers further evidence of her ability to trace the intersections of the human and nonhuman worlds. The title poem is a lyrical excavation of the city of Prague, where layers of history, culture and nature have accumulated to form “a genius loci”—a guardian spirit.

From Penguin.Com

Swamp Isthmus by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Swamp Isthmus takes the stripped, lyric voice of Selenography, the first book of Wilkinson’s No Volta pentalogy, and confronts a pre-apocalyptic vision of American urban life. Here, the city and forest are one, as are the river and sewer. The ghost and the body are one, and the buildings and the trees, the sidewalks and the switchbacks all fuse. The poems in Swamp Isthmus create the flipside of the pastoral—the urban returns to the rural, their fates...

Hemingway and the Black Renaissance ed. by Charles Scruggs and Edward Holcomb

Noted scholars [Holcomb and Scruggs] provide a solid framework for the study of the connections between Hemingway's writing and the literary works of black writers. The collection's unity relies on defining the "Black Renaissance" as encompassing not only the Harlem Renaissance but also teh subsequent advances in black literature sustaned through and beyond the war years, the Black Arts period, and "into the present transnational phase."—Choice Review

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