It’s back to school time!
With summer drawing to a close and the academic year approaching, we wanted to share with you some of the teaching guides we have for our books. All of our authors are always available for Skype class visits or email interviews. For a full list of all of our teaching guides available for immediate, check out our Teaching page here.
ICON by F. Douglas Brown offers a baroque reflection of ourselves through our own personal histories, and how it might pertain to the global history at large. Can be used for classes such as Poetry, Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, African-American Studies, American/Contemporary Literature, and Narrative Studies.
Gabrielle Civil’s Swallow the Fish is a memoir in performance art that explores the medium from within its beating heart. Adding its voice to black feminist conversations, it combines essays, anecdotes, and meditations with original performance texts to confront audience, motivation, and fears. Can be used in classes involving Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Performance Art / Performance Studies, Feminist Literature, Gender Studies / Women’s Studies, and African-American Studies to name a few.
Drowsy. Drowsy, Baby by Jared Joseph is a book and the translation of a book. It is a scroll named Jenny, after Noah’s unnamed wife, both pictured and absent. Like Edmond Jabès, Yoel Hoffman, and Susan Howe, Jared Joseph viscerally merges questions of linguistic, textual, and memorial representation with the persistent violence of religious narrative, historical trauma, and familial haunting. Can be used in Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Contemporary American Poetry, American/Contemporary Literature, Experimental Writing, Comparative Literature, and Translation Theory.
Wendy Ortiz’s Bruja is a Dreamoir—a narrative derived from the most malleable and revelatory details of one’s dreams, catalogued in bold detail. A literary adventure through the boundaries of memoir, where the self is viewed from a position anchored into the deepest recesses of the mind. Can be used in Creative Writing, Hybrid Forms, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Experimental Writing, Feminist Literature, Gender Studies / Women’s Studies, Psychology, and Xicanx & Latinx Studies.
How to Keep You Alive by Ella Longpre asks the impossible question of how one maintains a separation between past and present, memory from self, and inheritance from present body. Blurring the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction in a way that mirrors the attempt to capture what it is like to survive and to persist, How to Keep You Alive absorbs and sees the world through a lens of violence and trauma while struggling to maintain a present life in a body that continues to resist, to touch, to create rituals, to see, and to render the unseeable visually brilliant so the unsayable becomes a prayer. Can be used in Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Memoir/Anti-Memoir, Experimental Writing, Hybrid Forms, Feminist Literature, and Queer Literature/Bisexual Literature.
In his radical memoir, As I Stand Living, Christopher Higgs uses the constraint based techniques William Faulkner employed for the construction of As I Lay Dying to create a deeply personal and philosophical portrait of the year he became a father. Blending elements of fantasy and confession, Higgs confronts parenthood by divulging his most intimate fears, secrets, sorrows, and hopes as a writer, husband, and teacher. Can be used in classes involving Creative Writing, Creative Nonfiction & Memoir, Composition, American/Contemporary Literature, and Experimental Writing.