Starting this month, the Ashland MFA will share books recommended by our program’s faculty. We're including instructional guides, anthologies, and classics of the craft, all meant to be helpful tools for developing writers. Listed below are this month’s recommendations. Creative Nonfiction The Art of the Personal Essay , ed. by Phillip Lopate Recommended by Steve Harvey This is by far the most influential and extensive collection of personal essays in English. It contains work from antiquity and from Europe in translation as well as classic works by English and American Essayists. Lopate’s choices are judicious and representative and, read as a whole, give a sense of scope of this new and, before him, largely unchartered genre. Poetry The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them by Stephen Burt Recommended by Angela Estes This book was just published and offers a terrific introduction to the varied kinds of poetry of the late ...
A two-year, low-residency program in creative writing