Announcements

New Book Release from John Evans

Happy spring! To celebrate the start of a new quarter, we would like to spotlight a brand new chapbook from John Evans, lecturer in the Creative Writing Program.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Fight Journal by John Evans

I wrote the poems in The Fight Journal to make sense of an experience about which I felt strongly biased: my divorce. I wanted to recognize the humanity of all involved on the page because this was something I struggled to do in real life. I hoped to find closure, healing, and an answer to two questions. Why had my marriage failed? How had I been complicit in that failure? Adrienne Rich’s “From An Old House in America” was the formal model for the long title poem. Marta Tikkanen’s “The Love Story of the Century” was a precedent for writing about these dynamics. Both poems are personal favorites.

 

John W. Evans is the author of The Fight Journal (Rattle, forthcoming 2023), winner of the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and Should I Still Wish: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), Young Widower: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), and The Consolations: Poems (Trio House Press, 2014).

His books have won prizes including the the Rattle Chapbook Prize, the Peace Corps Writers Book Prize, a ForeWord Reviews Book Prize, the River Teeth Book Prize, the Sawtooth Poetry Prize, and the Trio Award. Should I Still Wish was selected by Poets and Writers magazine as a “new and noteworthy” title of January/February 2017, and is published in the American Lives Series.

His work appears or is forthcoming in The Missouri Review (2016 Editor’s Prize Finalist), Poets & Writers, Slate, Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Flyfish Journal, Pangyrus, and Best American Essays 2011 (Honorable Mention), as well as the chapbooks, No Season (FWQ, 2011) and Zugzwang (RockSaw, 2009).

John is currently the Phyllis Draper Lecturer in Nonfiction at Stanford University, where he was previously a Jones Lecturer and a Wallace Stegner Fellow. At Stanford, John has been recognized as a “favorite professor” by the women’s basketball, water polo, and volleyball teams, as well as the Knight Fellows and the DCI Fellows. He lives in Northern California with his three young sons.