MFA in Creative Writing | Faculty Authored Books

A collection of books, book contributions, and anthologies edited by the faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing Program.

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Still You: Poems of Illness & Healing

Joan Baranow

Poetry. STILL YOU gathers together poems that invite us into private rooms of suffering and solace. In these profoundly personal stanzas, we recognize our own encounters with nature's inevitable blows. By turns we fall ill, we recover, we care for a loved one, we prepare for loss. At these times poetry can open the door to the sickroom and offer a potent physic for the isolation that comes with illness. Here you will find a wife's fierce resistance to cancer's attack as well as the courage to accept a feared diagnosis. You will find poems of humor, joy, gratitude, and consolation. Ultimately, a resilient spirit binds us together. As poet Gail Tierney says, "whatever it may be, you're not alone." - publisher's description -
Spring and a Thousand Years

Judy Halebsky

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize

A translator’s notebook, an almanac, an ecological history, Judy Halebsky’s Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) moves between multiple intersections and sign systems connected in a long glossary poem that serves as the book’s guide to what is lost, erased, or disrupted in transition both from experience to written word and from one language, location, and time period to another.

Writers Li Bai, Matsuo Bashō, Sei Shōnagon, and Du Fu make frequent appearances in centuries ranging from the eighth to the twenty-first, and appear in conversation with Grace Paley, Donald Hall, and Halebsky herself, as the poet explores subjects ranging from work and marriage to environmental destruction. Asking what would happen if these poets—not just their work—appeared in California, the poems slip between different geographies, syntaxes, times, and cultural frameworks.

The role of the literary translator is to bring text from one language into another, working to at once shift and retain the context of the original—from one alphabet to another, one point in time to another. These are poems in homage to translation; they rely on concepts that can bridge time and space, and as a result are as likely to find meaning in donuts or Zumba as they are to find it in the ocean. Spring and a Thousand Years (Unabridged) finds reasons for hope not in how the world should be, but in how it has always been.

Supported by the Miller and Lucinda Williams Poetry Fund.
In the Next Life

Joan Baranow

Poetry. Joan Baranow's powerful new collection of poems, IN THE NEXT LIFE, reminds us that it is our passage through this life that constantly shapes the next. Our place in and passages through the natural world reflect both the questions of childhood and those few wisdoms we hope to share as adults. Always, the speaker of these poems ('closer to the end / than to birth, dreaming of death' she says) recalls a boy's question: 'How does light climb the tree?' In these elegant poems of daily mortal passage, Joan Baranow is also asking, in every line, how might we, each of us, slowly climb that light? These are poems of constancy and moral courage."--David St. John
Personal Agency and Community Empowerment: Moth Style Engagement

Judy Halebsky

Narrative in Performance invites us to pay close attention to the aspects of performance that create a story. Considering text, Body, stage, technology and audience, this stimulating collection:
- Explores the significance of cultural identity, the role of popular culture, and the impact of revolutionary ideas for marginalized communities
- Draws on examples from a rich variety of historical and contemporary genres. from Asian dance drama to online video games
- Considers the future of performance in light of social media
Love is Blind in One Eye

Marianne Rogoff

"In these linked stories Jewel navigates the stage of life between 25 and 45, from the day she finds a body on a wild California beach to crossroads encounters with mystics, lovers, beggars, surgeons, and sailors on the shores of Maui and streets of San Miguel de Allende, Lisbon, Larkspur, Mill Valley, and Barcelona. Falling in love, whether with the one she marries, her newborn babies, total strangers, or the places she goes, calls forth conflicting sensations: ease/excitement, pleasure/danger, attachment/release. One eye sees and the other is blind as Jewel learns to love and grieve by staying in motion, finding and losing her way in the crowds and landscapes, heart cracked open." ~ from the publisher
Haiku in West Coast Poetics: What Kigo?

Judy Halebsky

"

When I attended the Meguro International Haiku Circle last year, I asked for ideas for presentation topics. Someone suggested that I explain why poets in the U.S. are not overly concerned with kigo. Coming from a lineage of California poets influenced by haiku and Japanese poetry, I am not sure if I understand the subtleties of this challenge. However, the question of kigo brings up a larger issue: the cultural translation of haiku in the work of English language poets. Today, I would like to touch on the issues that have shaped how free verse poets in California translate haiku both as a text and as a creative practice."

Article excerpt
Tree Line

Judy Halebsky

"Robert Frost believed a poem should begin in delight and end in wisdom, but in TREE LINE, Judy Halebsky proves a poet never has to choose between the two—her poems begin in both and end in both. Smart, sexy, thoughtful, and beautiful, Halebsky's lyrics are a masterful marriage of tradition and innovation. This remarkable book loves many things—language and landscape to be sure—but most of all, it loves this world and how we make our way in it."—Dean Rader
Tell Me Again: Poetry and Prose from The Healing Art of Writing, 2012

Joan Baranow [Editor]

For more than a decade The Healing Art of Writing conference has sought to strengthen compassionate understanding between healthcare providers and those who seek a state of well-being beyond the reach of surgery or pharmacology. Together, the participants share the belief that being cured of disease is not the same thing as being healed, and that a practice of expressive writing promotes both spiritual and physical healing. The writings presented at the 2012 conference, collected here in Tell Me Again, are a powerful testament to that belief. Within these pages you will hear, again and again, words of truth, words that uplift, words that heal.
Silvie's Life: Biography of a Baby Girl

Marianne Rogoff

"This story, about a severely brain-damaged baby who doctors warn will die within days, is beautifully told and exquisitely woven with subtlety and suspense..." ~ Patricia Holt
Space/Gap/Interval/Distance

Judy Halebsky

The poems in Judy Halebsky’s Space/Gap/Interval/Distance, winner of the Sixteen Rivers Press 2011 Poets-Under-Forty Chapbook Contest, combine memory and depth of feeling with luminous observation and precision of craft. In a voice utterly and breathtakingly her own, Halebsky translates her experience of living in Japan into poems influenced by butoh dance, haiku, and, momentously, the Japanese language itself, finding in kanji, the basic written characters of Japanese, a rich source of insight, metaphor, and fresh associative power.
The Healing Art of Writing: Volume One

Joan Baranow [Editor], Brian Dolan [Editor], and David Watts [Editor]

The pieces in The Healing Art of Writing: Volume One originated a the conference of this name that brought together caregivers and patients who share a passion for writing about the mysterious forces of illness and recovery. A belief shared among all contributors is that being cured of a disease is not the same as being healed, and that writing poetry and prose brings us to a place of healing. Our subject is the body, our medical experiences widely diverse, our goal to express through literature what happens when a physical or mental anguish disrupts our lives.
Eki Mae Poems [Volume 3]

Ilya Kaminsky, Yuka Tsukagoshi, Judy Halebsky, and Ayumu Akutsu

Bilingual Japanese-English poetry journal.
Common Tongues

Marianne Rogoff

Since publishing A Woman's World in 1995, Travelers' Tales has been the recognized leader in women's travel literature, and with the launch of the annual series The Best Travel Writing in 2004, the obvious next step was an annual collection of the best women's travel writing of the year. This title is the seventh in an annual series-- The Best Women's Travel Writing --that presents inspiring and uplifting adventures from women who have traveled to the ends of the earth to discover new places, peoples, and facets of themselves. The common threads are a woman's perspective and compelling storytell.
Sky=Empty

Judy Halebsky

Winner of the 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize, selected by Marvin Bell. From Judge's Citation: "I was caught by the clarity of mind and expression of SKY=EMPTY--quality distinctive at any time. I was caught by the ear and eye, the tone of voice, and the easy movement between inner and outer. The respect for language is tangible. This is a beautiful, engaging first book."
Eki Mae Poems [Volume 2]

Brenda Hillman, Yuka Tsukagoshi, Judy Halebsky, and Ayumu Akutsu

Bilingual Japanese-English poetry journal.
Eki Mae Poems [Volume 1]

Judy Halebsky, Yuka Tsukagoshi, Fumiko Yamanaka, and Ayumu Akutsu

Bilingual Japanese-English poetry journal.
Where Is Home: And Other Stories

Thomas Burke

These stories focus on small but important moments in the lives of gay men, most of them mature or middle-aged men living in comfort in a city that might be San Franicsco.
Living Apart

Joan Baranow

Finely crafted poetry of love and relationship by California poet, Joan Baranow.
80 On the 80s: A Decade's History in Verse

Robert McGovern [Editor] and Joan Baranow [Editor]

Some 87 poets chronicle the past decade in over 100 poems
Meeting My Father Halfway

Marianne Rogoff

The filial bonds represented in these 27 short stories by contemporary women range from natural and intimate, as in the excerpts from Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, wherein a daughter happily tastes food from her father's plate, to artificial and unpleasant, as in the weekend spent by two blood-related strangers in Mariane Rogoff's "Meeting My Father Halfway." Two of the best stories--Edna O'Brien's "What a Sky" and Joyce Carol Oates's "Stroke"--examine in jarring detail the complexity of seemingly "normal" relationships. A lingering sense of loss and missed opportunities infuses the omnibus. Hospitals and funerals are the prevailing setting; in one story, "People Should Not Die in June in South Texas," by Gloria E. Anzaldua, a father's death occasions a narrative that's more like a wail of grief. The tone throughout is one of compassion mixed with anger--only in one instance, Carolyn Gage's "Letter to My Father," does it descend into unadulterated hatred--and though the stories can repeat themselves thematically, on the whole this anthology will have something to say to anyone who has ever been, or ever had, a daughter. ~ Publisher's Weekly