We're pleased to welcome the editors and select contributors to The Lyric Essay as Resistance: Truth from the Margins to read from their work
Click here to join the webinar event on 5/8. No pre-registration required!
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About the book: Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of the best lyric essays published in the last several years by prominent and emerging writers. Editors Zoë Bossiere and Erica Trabold situate this anthology within the ongoing work of resistance-to genre convention, literary tradition, and the confines of dominant-culture spaces. As sites of resistance, these essays are diverse and include investigations into deeply personal and political topics such as queer and trans identity, the American BIPOC experience, reproductive justice, belonging, grief, and more.
The lyric essay is always surprising; it is bold, unbound, and free. This collection highlights the lyric essay's natural capacity for representation and resistance and celebrates the form as a subversive genre that offers a mode of expression for marginalized voices. The Lyric Essay as Resistance features contemporary work by essayists including Melissa Febos, Wendy S. Walters, Torrey Peters, Jenny Boully, Crystal Wilkinson, Elissa Washuta, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, and many more. Their work demonstrates the power of the lyric essay to bring about change, both on the page and in our communities.
Wendy S. Walters is concentration head in nonfiction and associate professor in the writing program of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, New York. She is the author or editor of four books, including Multiply/Divide: On the American Real and Surreal. She is completing her next book, an argument against the use of white paint.
Crystal Wilkinson, Kentucky’s Poet Laureate, is the award-winning author of Perfect Black, and three works of fiction. She is the recipient of an NAACP Image Award, an O. Henry Prize, and an Ernest Gaines Prize. Praise Song for the Kitchen Ghosts, a culinary memoir, is forthcoming from Clarkson Potter/Penguin Random House.
Camellia-Berry Grass was born and raised in rural Missouri. She is the author of Hall of Waters and Let the White Dove Sing. Her essays and poems appear in The Texas Review, Waxwing, DIAGRAM, and Barrelhouse, among other publications. In 2019 she was a finalist for the Krause Essay Prize. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing at Rosemont College.
Zoë Bossiere is a genderfluid writer from Tucson, Arizona. She received her doctorate in creative nonfiction and in rhetoric and composition from Ohio University. She is the managing editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction and coeditor of its anthology, The Best of Brevity. She also hosts a podcast interviewing nonfiction writers about their debut books for the New Book Network’s New Books in Literature channel.
Erica Trabold is the author of Five Plots, winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. Her lyric essays appear in Brevity, The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, and Seneca Review. She received her master of fine arts from Oregon State University. Erica currently writes and teaches in central Virginia, where she is an assistant professor at Sweet Briar College.
