I recently interviewed my friend, Sue Eisenfeld, about her creative nonfiction writing, and it turns out she’s taught a range of courses and workshops at Johns Hopkins University in creative nonfiction. She’s […]

I’ve kept an idea journal for as long as I can remember. Whenever a word, sentence or story idea strikes my fancy, I jot it down and date the entry.

One day, I thumbed through the pages, noticing dates on e […]

Wedding in Richmond
 

they’re roasting a pig at Tuckahoe Plantation
crowds gather on the grounds
where little Thomas Jefferson once lived
sweet jasmine tangles in the garden
banjos play on the […]

Just like the adage about loving yourself before being able to love another person, I’ve come to understand that in order to write with depth, you first have to learn to write about yourself. I grew up in a […]

Michael fled his village in South Sudan at the age of five. He trekked a thousand miles through war zones to arrive at a series of refugee camps where he lived for a decade. As a child at Kukuma Refugee Camp, […]

Snow Falls Off Bare Branch
 
At a reading, the poet responds to the art
of the Japanese woodblock. But I only see
the man’s head blocking my view,

white hair combed counterclockwise, hiding
terrain wh […]

As the new poetry editor of Streetlight, I find myself caught between the delights and demands of poetry and the nightmare of current events happening here in our nation and globally. I want to attempt to answer a […]

A conversation with writer director Eleanor Gaver
I met Eleanor Gaver in a writing workshop in L.A. and we kept in touch after she and her husband and daughter moved to NYC. I knew she had recently finished a […]

Some writers spend years honing their craft until their work unfolds with the effortless grace of an Olympic figure skater. It’s the kind of ease and proficiency that looks impossible—belying countless hours of r […]

Machinery and tools—their design, operation and production—were early interests that would shape Blake Hurt’s professional and creative life. “I picked a field of engineering that would be relative […]

Memphis, on the brink of World War II, a crowded city, my family squeezed in a small duplex. Mother and Father work in weapons factories. We’re gathered around the radio in our tiny living room.

Suddenly a s […]

It was midnight of our last night in the cannery, and all twelve of us who had been assigned the fish house had been working since seven that morning. All day and into the light-filled night, we had been cleaning […]