An online home for the American University Creative Writing MFA community
Café Américain is thrilled to welcome first-year MFA candidate Yohanca Delgado to our editorial staff. Yohanca is a first-year MFA candidate. She loves to read all three genres, but mostly writes creative nonfiction. She lived overseas for a long time (Paris, Cairo, Sao Paulo, Kyiv,…
By Yohanca Delgado In Japan, repairing broken pottery is an art form called Kintsugi (“golden joinery”), which uses gold to meld the broken pieces back together. In her book of essays, Quiéreme (“Love Me”), Juliana Delgado Lopera’s outlines the ways in the which the self…
By Yohanca Delgado Elena Passarello is an actor, writer, and recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award. Her first collection Let Me Clear My Throat (Sarabande, 2012), won the gold medal for nonfiction at the 2013 Independent Publisher Awards and was a finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award.…
By Yohanca Delgado As the semester enters full swing (and everyone recovers from Saturday night’s literary sugar coma) we’ve all got another wonderful event to look forward to, our first Visiting Writers event featuring Fatimah Asghar. Asghar is a nationally touring poet, performer, educator, and writer.…
By Yohanca Delgado This year’s issue of Folio focused on the theme of crossroads and intersections, places where “two paths, two ideas, meet, converge, collide, or divide.” In keeping with Folio tradition, 33 features award-winning pieces selected by members of our own American University faculty. As a nonfiction…
By Yohanca Delgado Launching on May 7, Grace in Darkness celebrates the work of 25 women writers in the metro DC area. The anthology is the eighth in a series created by Gargoyle editor Richard Peabody in 2004 and passed on AU’s own Melissa Scholes Young in 2017.…
By Yohanca Delgado I first met Angela Maria Spring just over a year ago, when I was hosting the Artomatic literary open mic and wandered into her very first pop-up. We became fast friends and watching Duende District explode from a Kickstarter campaign to a DC-brand…
By Yohanca Delgado Elizabeth Acevedo is a slam poet and used to teach middle-school before she turned to writing books— and you can tell from the moment she steps onto the stage. She’s wearing sweatpants, her signature curls are flawless, and she’s one of those…
By Yohanca Delgado You’ve got so many cool things going on that it’s hard to choose a starting point. Let’s talk about BritLit first, your new podcast highlighting British literature. What inspired you to create a podcast? I have been listening to podcasts for…
By Yohanca Delgado Last Wednesday, we gathered for a cherished AU MFA tradition: an annual faculty reading to benefit the magical 826 DC. Prospective students, current students, alumni, and faculty mingled over wine and cheese before the reading—and few of us could resist the gravitational…