Smith lay on his back, on the top bunk of the rack he and I shared in Machine Gun’s squad bay, with both of his feet tied to the wooden support beams that ran to the ground. Smith and Ulrich had …

What I do is absorb. Pah-pah, pah-pah. I hear the punches when I walk these rainy streets. I hear them when I sleep. I hear them in the small hours on my knees in the dark, running my cut-up hands …

Ilana, the Hebrew teacher at Houston's Beth Yeshurun Day School, which we called Beth Yesh, gave us actual-size apple-shaped milk chocolates that fell apart into neatly overlapping slices. One day an …

Janet was ten when our town turned to poultry. Layers and broilers at first, but there was no profit in eggs and soon it was all just pluck and slaughter. She stood alongside line workers, barefoot …

In Lorrie Moore’s pitch perfect short story, “Agnes of Iowa,” her eponymous central character attempts to encourage Christa, a young African American woman in her creative writing class. The …

On the last leg of my book tour in 2013, I was invited to do an event at the Asian American Writers Workshop.  I was there to promote my novel Southern Cross the Dog .  The book is about a young …

As a professor who teaches in the creative writing, literature, and Latino studies programs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where we offer the Ph.D. with a creative dissertation, I’ve been …

In the typical creative writing workshop, a group of the writer’s peers discuss her work while she stays silent. “One of the most useful things a workshop can do for the writer is to reflect the …

A flood takes no notice of the borders we construct between inside and out. Like Cassandra sitting in the kitchen sink at her window, the Willoweed family and servant Old Ives can do nothing but …

Tahlequah, OK, has one Wal-Mart, one good regional supermarket, many of the major fast food chains, two operational video stores, and 16,000 residents. It’s where I live, home to the university …

            Recently, I was talking to my friend, Camas, at a party when the subject of our college admittance essays came up. I haven’t done a lot of thinking about this particular bit of …

Walk down The Hill, away from the university, and you pass beneath the highway into patches of housing projects known as The Bricks. Past that, the empty streets of downtown. Past that, residential …

Soon after graduating college, my father lost his construction job. The Teton Dam he helped build let loose its foundations and poured downhill, flooding a fifth of Idaho. He began distance running …

I’d like to fear the falling, or be feared for falling, or be myself what is feared most: inexhaustible, as clouds, as moisture. Such is/as faith. Such is responsibility and believing in something …

Whistles while he works. Whistles the jetty. Whistles the rip tide. Whistles the sand terrier, sky kite dangerous. Whistles liquor in a bag, on the sly. Whistles for your attention, for your safety, …

I started modeling at 32, to keep myself fed while I wrote a novel. I was by that point eight years into what I suppose is called a “spiritual practice.” Initially, there was a clarifying horror …

I thought letting him go quietly would be too much like letting myself get hustled off a cliff. He could kill me with those shrugs. Then there was screaming, a lot of it, and I’m not ashamed to …

In the early ’80s, I wrote Samuel Beckett a letter. I explained that I was trying to write, adding that he was probably often sought out by strangers, and so rather than asking him to read my work, …

It was the very first poetry exchange since China opened its door to the west, a confluence of great poets across the Pacific.

The drone operator does not see the Predator itself, the predator himself, the Predator is in Afghanistan, the operator in Nevada. We are stars struck on the edge. The difference between my sight and …