In the video below, you can watch my recent conversation with Saida Agostini, poet and President of Funders for LGBTQ Issues, about her new book, let the dead in (Alan Squire, 2022). It is a book deeply rooted in Black Queer female Guyanese American experiences, which, in this instance, translates into poems of magic, family, […]
Editorial Note: Isabella Sanchez interviewed Celia Lisset Alvarez for my Poetry Writing II course at The University of Tampa in Spring 2021. I find their conversation incredibly engaging and meaningful, and I’m grateful for them allowing me to share it here. Isa wrote the following introduction. Cuban American scholar and poet Celia Lisset Alvarez is […]
One of the books that helped me the most when I was a student was Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Utah State UP, now in the second edition). On the surface, the book lays out practical moves for working with sources in academic writing, moves like “forwarding,” “countering,” “remixing,” and so […]
Laughter echoing through the house, delicious aromas circulating the air, male sports comments shouted at the tv, the pitter-patter of children’s feet running to sneak into the kitchen, clanging of pots and pans, and the ding of an oven are all included in the first few minutes of the movie Soul Food. All of this […]
Do you want to make a million dollars this year? Are you tired of working for minimum wage? Do you want to escape the 9 to 5? What if I told you all of this is possible, and I’m going to teach you how to make this a reality for yourself . . . Enticing […]
Editor’s Note: In the fall 2020 semester, during the pandemic, Jessie Goldstein conducted a survey about her fellow students’ experiences and views of street art for a research essay in my Writing and Research class at the University of Tampa. For a follow-up assignment re-mediating the research (or putting it into a new medium) to […]
Editorial Note: In the Fall 2020 semester, Barbara Jane Reyes visited (by zoom) my class on Poetic Forms at the University of Tampa to talk about her latest book of poems, Letters to a Young Brown Girl—which, I believe, we were the first class ever to read. After our class conversation, Reyes generously sent me […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Gabriela M. Gonzalez took my African American Literature course in the spring of 2020, the semester interrupted by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. I so appreciated her final reflection about the course and what she learned that I wanted to share. Reading African American literature can be both gruesome and inspiring. […]
“Those are the heaviest songs and they / Have to be pried from the earth with shovels of grief.” I know those songs. I know a life of pain, and grief, and suffering. I know what it’s like to sing a song for death when the rest of the world sings songs of falling-in-love. I […]
We read Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions by Valeria Luiselli in my World Literature course in the spring of 2019. This piercing little book narrates her experience volunteering to translate for lawyers who are volunteering to help process asylum applications for child refugees from Central America who have arrived unaccompanied in […]
When the scholar James Chase Sanchez recently wrote on social media, “White supremacy will destroy us,” a white man I will call Chad responded with a well-intended paragraph. His comment is so dense with common misunderstandings of white supremacy that I find it instructive to unpack line by line. The full comment reads: Nah…theres way […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: Tenielle Mounts-Williams wrote this essay in my English Composition I course at Southeastern University in spring 2019. I found her writing moving, her message pressing, and her drawing striking. I am delighted to share her work with you. Don’t Touch, I’m Not Yours Imagine me washing my hair to start the day […]
In a July newsletter just posted to his website, Dr. James Dobson, one of the leading evangelical Christian voices in the United States, narrates his visit to one of the immigrant detention centers along the southern border, where the US Customs and Border Protection holds refugees who have fled from Central America and elsewhere to […]
In this interview, Rilee Oien talks with the poet Natalie Giarratano about Big Thicket Blues. Giarratano, who won the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry, Leaving Clean, lives in Colorado with her partner, daughter, and dog. This conversation covers a number of topics, from specific poems in the book, to the poet’s childhood in Texas, […]
In this interview, Ireland Dempster talks with Marjorie Maddox about Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, a captivating collection of poems exploring the human body’s physical, spiritual, and mental aspects. Describing her father’s unsuccessful heart transplant during the blizzard of 1993, Maddox walks the reader through her experience with losing her father and her journey of healing, often through surreal descriptions […]
My friend the poet Devon Balwit, in stepping away from social media, invited me to correspond by handwritten letters. Although I have written about how valuable such an act can be, I find it difficult to make time to practice it regularly, which probably makes it all the more important. Indeed, I have been edified […]
I talked with Emily Jungmin Yoon (@EmilyYoon), poet, translator, and doctoral candidate in comparative literature at the University of Chicago, about her latest book, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets—a tiny anthology of translations just out from Axis Press as part of a series on “Translating Feminisms.” Our conversation began by considering two related statements Yoon makes […]
In this interview, James Shaw discusses with Wendy Chin-Tanner her brand-new book of poems, Anyone Will Tell You. Their conversation covers fertility and infertility, motherhood, and the struggle of two miscarriages. They also unpack how Chin-Tanner’s experience writing a graphic novel influences her poetry, the role of nature in poetry, the practicing of keeping a […]
In this interview, Andrew Gillis asks the poet M.E. Silverman (@MESilverman_BLP and Blue Lyra Press) about his most recent book, The Floating Door, particularly regarding Silverman’s fascination with Zablon Simintov of Afghanistan, the thought process behind choices he made in his poetry, and how Jewish life in America compares to Jewish life in Afghanistan. Silverman also […]
Let us consider two scenarios, both of which begin the same way: Emily has worked for Soap, Inc. for seven years. She has very few coworkers of color. All of her bosses are white. Every once in a while an overtly racist incident will happen—like when someone pitched a commercial of a black woman washing […]
“My Passion for Literature Succumbed to Reality,” writes Bianca Vivion Brooks in an op-ed in The New York Times. While Brooks loves majoring in English—the reading, the writing, the thinking, the discussions—her family sacrificed for her to go to college and count on her to help out after graduating. She needs a decent, steady income. […]
Ravi Shankar’s just-published book The Many Uses of Mint presents new and selected poems from twenty years of his writing, including from the Norton anthology he co-edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. The poet Lisa Pegram and I recently sat down with Ravi over video chat to […]
I am writing an essay that celebrates the groundbreaking work of the late Robert Scholes (1929-2016), one of my favorite literary and pedagogical scholars, whose books, especially The Rise and Fall of English (1998) and The Crafty Reader (2001), influenced me a great deal during graduate school and continue to influence me to this day. But as […]
In the video below, I sit down with David Mura—teacher of creative writing and author of at least ten books of poetry, fiction, memoir, and craft criticism—to discuss his new book: A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing. In both the book and our conversation, Mura speaks with insight, clarity, and grace on: […]
In the video below, I chat with Patricia Roberts-Miller, PhD, about her recent book Demagoguery and Democracy. Although as a scholar of rhetoric or specifically “of train wrecks in public deliberation,” Roberts-Miller has written a number of academic tomes (and in fact has a scholarly version of this one forthcoming), she wrote this as a little […]
In this video, Hal Bush and I discuss his new novel, The Hemingway Files, which takes readers on a tour of Japan and of American literary history, asking, along the way, such questions as “How can we know the ‘Other’?” “What’s the worth of words?” “What are truth and beauty and meaning?” and “How do traumas shape […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: In my English Composition I course, I have started asking students to experiment with how they read, first reading a book (James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time) as they usually would, then rereading that same book while trying out my advice for how to read deeply, then writing a comparison and contrast essay […]
Corrigan’s Editorial Note: My World Literature course asks students to find creative, meditative ways of working with texts from around the globe. In fall 2017, Kylei Strahan took Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Path”—a fascinating, bizarre, deeply multicultural text, written by an Argentine writer, set in the UK, revolving around a location in France, […]
Corrigan Literary Review 