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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

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....

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...

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...

The Anxiety of Everyday Objects by Aurelie Sheehan

Excerpt from Chapter One

All good secretaries will eventually find truth in the hearts of men.

Winona Bartlett, Win to her friends, might not have been the world’s best secretary, but her nature was such that serving, subservience, and coffee service came easily, and, in fact, she felt there was an inherent good in doing things well, and this determination more than equaled her actual interest in the long-term prospects at Grecko Mauster Crill. She practiced her secretarial...

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...

Hope is the Thing with Feathers by Chris Cokinos

A prizewinning poet and nature writer weaves together natural history, biology, sociology, and personal narrative to tell the story of the lives, habitats, and deaths of six extinct bird species.

“This story – of the ghost species still haunting this continent – is full of power and mystery.”

Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature

“I was mesmerized by this fine book and felt in reading these lost natural histories as if I had both been...

Geography of the Heart by Fenton Johnson

With grace and affection, Johnson recounts the history of “how I fell in love, how I came to be with someone else, and how he came to death and how I helped, how in the end love enables us to continue beyond death.” At the same time, Johnson interweaves two stories: his own upbringing as the youngest of a Kentucky whiskey maker’s nine children, and that of his lover Larry Rose, the only child of German Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. Johnson’s writing has been described by Barbara...

Jack Kerouac is Pregnant: Stories by Aurelie Sheehan

Excerpt from “Jack Kerouac Is Pregnant”

How to Be a Passenger on a Motorcycle

The motorcycle owner gets on the bike. He’s stomped on the clutch or whatever that thing is, the choke maybe. He dons his big helmet, puts on his big black gloves, lifts his leg over the hulking machine. He situates himself on the seat, revs, adjusts the mirror, and looks at you, standing on the sidewalk like an orphan. You take the cue. You tentatively put on your helmet, a white one unlike his...

Vanishing Point by Ander Monson

In contemporary America, land of tell-all memoirs and endless reality television, what kind of person denies the opportunity to present himself in his own voice, to lead with “I”? How many layers of a life can be peeled back before the self vanishes?

In this provocative, witty series of meditations, Ander Monson faces down the idea of the memoir, grappling with the lure of self-interest and self-presentation. While setting out to describe the experience of serving as head juror at...

Horse, Flower, Bird by Kate Bernheimer

In Kate Bernheimer’s familiar and spare, yet wondrous world, an exotic dancer builds her own cage, a wife tends a secret basement menagerie, a fishmonger’s daughter befriends a tulip bulb, and sisters explore cycles of love and violence by reenacting scenes from Star Wars. Enthralling, subtle, and poetic, this collection evokes the age-old pleasures of classic fairy tales and makes them new.

Horse, Flower, Bird includes 8 black and white illustrations.

“Once upon a...

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