An online home for the American University Creative Writing MFA community
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 […]
By Vince Granata In advance of Wednesday’s Visiting Writer event, I had the opportunity to ask Jan Wagner several questions about his new collection of poetry, collaborating with David Keplinger, object studies, the challenge of translation, and dachshunds. Join us on Wednesday to continue the conversation with Wagner […]
By Yohanca Delgado Ahead of tomorrow’s Visiting Writers Event, I had the pleasure of talking on the phone with the charming and gracious Imbolo Mbue about Behold the Dreamers, character development, drafts, and Motorola RZRs. YD: How is all the travel going? Are you working on any […]
By Karan Madhok Behold the Dreamers By Imbolo Mbue 397 pp. Random House. $17 Over a million immigrants a year are granted permanent residence in the United States. They leave behind their families, their homes, their favorite foods, their language, culture, and often, the […]
By Vince Granata I’m not certain I’ve encountered a better description of a magazine than the following: Gargoyle has always been a scallywag magazine, a maverick magazine, a bit too academic for the underground and way too underground for the academics. Gargoyle Magazine, the […]
We don’t know about you, but the staff over here at Café cannot wait to hear Ada Limón read tonight. In preparation for Limón’s visit, editor Yohanca Delgado chatted with her about form, voice, and swimming with Natalie Diaz. CA: You’ve said in […]
By Yohanca Delgado Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family is a beautiful, headlong dive into the life of a family in the Bronx from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. LeBlanc immersed herself in the lives of her subjects for eleven years, chronicling the cycles of crime, […]
The 2016 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction recipient, James Hannaham, will be joining the AU Literature Department for a reading on Wednesday, November 9. Hannaham is a journalist, critic, and fiction writer, and is the author of God Says No. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, […]
Last month, I had the pleasure of meeting author Paula Whyman for coffee. For an hour, we talked about the writing life, her writing process, and her debut collection of short stories, You May See A Stranger. Paula Whyman will be reading from You May See A […]
Jacqueline Woodson is the author of more than thirty books for young readers. In 2015, her memoir-in-verse, Brown Girl Dreaming, won the National Book Award and secured Woodson recognition by the Poetry Foundation as Young People’s Poet Laureate. Her work has won multiple accolades, including […]