Anna Leahy is the author of the nonfiction book Tumor and the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter. She is the co-author of Conversing with Cancer, Generation Space, and What We Talk about When We Talk about Creative Writing. Her essays won the top prizes from Ninth Letter and Dogwood in 2016. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she curates the Tabula Poetics reading series and edits the international journal TAB.
“I don’t cater to the fiction writers in my poetry courses, yet they have taught me to acknowledge commonalities across genres. In exploring these commonalities, we better see distinctions as well.”
“This collection, as a whole, is not about the Space Age, per se. Still, that place and time exquisitely inflect each story.”
“Annie Finch’s Spells, a sweeping new and selected book, pushes readers to consider and even embrace the tradition of women’s poetry. It is no conundrum for her.”
“I don’t cater to the fiction writers in my poetry courses, yet they have taught me to acknowledge commonalities across genres. In exploring these commonalities, we better see distinctions as well.”
When I was an MFA student at the University of Maryland, Stanley Plumly said two things about my poetry that have stuck with me and shaped not only how I think about my writing process but also how I approach teaching creative writing. In one conference, he asked, Will you ever write a ten-syllable line? Stanley Plumly is fond of John Keats’s work, so maybe he did want me to write in ten-syllable lines, but the question was designed to force to me think about formal choices I was making. My initial, silent response was that I was experimenting with […]
With the rise of digital culture, teachers must examine how to help students connect with literature all over again, and teachers who are also writers have a particular interest in building students’ “literary citizenship.” Writer and teacher Anna Leahy looks for perspectives on this dilemma in four books by Marjorie Garber, Christina Vischer Bruns, Kevin Stein, and David Orr.
