Laura Kasischke
Associate Professor
PROFILE:
LAURA KASISCHKE has
published six collections of poetry and three novels. Her novels include Suspicious River (1996), White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), and The Life Before Her Eyes (2002). They have been translated widely, and adapted for film. In 2006, her first novel for young adults, Boy Heaven, will be published by Harper Collins. Her most recent poetry collections are Gardening in the Dark (2004) from Ausable Press, and Dance and Disappear ,
which received the Juniper Award in 2002 from the University of
Massachusetts Press . She has also been the recipient of two creative
writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, several Pushcart
Prizes, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley
Award. Her other collections of poetry are Wild Brides , Housekeeping in a Dream , Fire and Flower and What It Wasn't . Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic , The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. Kasischke, an Assistant Professor with our program, has a joint appointment at the Residential College .
Laura Kasischke on the Workshop
My workshop emphasizes the discussion of issues related to writing;
specifically, these issues will arise in response to the new work
written and submitted by workshop members:
I
state my definition in this round-about way because I'd like to
emphasize that my approach to the workshop privileges the discussion of
the elements, techniques, and troubles of writing over the goal of
setting out to fix a specific piece of writing.
In the rest of your writing life, you will learn primarily through
struggle with your own work, alone. In this brief period of your
writing life, you'll learn, too, by struggling with the work of your
peers. It can be time- consuming, to be sure, but responding to the
new work of others can be as great an act of creativity as writing
one's own new work. And, it's a great short-cut to learning how to
read your own work objectively. With some conscientious effort, the
graduate writing workshop becomes not only a place to practice and
improve our craft, but a true community of writers. We need to bring
all the energy we can to each workshop, and an ambitious generosity.
There's no such thing as too much passion when it comes to making art
or responding to it. My goal for the workshop is that it will,
eventually, become a sustaining memory of a place where serious insight
and support was generated and shared--a place and time to which you can
return again and again in your mind during the more solitary days of
writing ahead.
From Dance and Disappear, "A Kitchen Song"
From The Life Before Her Eyes
Publications:
Lilies Without (poetry collection, Ausable Press, 2007); Be Mine (novel, Harcourt, 2007); Boy Heaven (novel for young adults, HarperCollins, 2006); Gardening in the Dark (poetry collection, Ausable Press, 2004); The Life Before Her Eyes, (novel, Harcourt, 2002); Dance and Disappear, (poetry collection, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); What It Wasn't, (poetry collection, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001); Fire & Flower, (poetry collection, Alice James Books, 1999); White Bird in a Blizzard, (novel, Hyperion, 1998); Suspicious River, (novel, Houghton Mifflin, 1996); Housekeeping in a Dream, (poetry collection, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1995); Wild Brides, (poetry collection, New York University Press, 1991). Poetry published in Harper's, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review, Pushcart anthologies. Recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers (NYU Press), Beatrice Hawley Award, Juniper Award (Univ. of Massachusetts Press), Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award (Poetry Society of America).
Reasearch Interests:
Department Areas of Study: Creative Writing; Pedagogy; Poetry and Poetics; Writing of Fiction
Primary: The writing of poetry; the writing of fiction; the teaching of creative writing.
Secondary: Contemporary poetics; the contemporary novel; the Black Mountain Poets; the literature of the Midwest.
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