New Book Releases from the Creative Writing Community

As we close the chapter on this academic year and head into the heat of summer, we want to highlight books released by our lecturers and Stegner Fellows. Spanning publication years of 2019 to present, these books may just be the perfect picks for your summer reading list.

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love by Keith S. Wilson

“A strong debut collection in which the romanticism you expect (and want) from a younger writer is held in check by a considerable, self-questioning intelligence.” —The New York Times

Keith S. Wilson is an Affrilachian Poet and Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA fellowship as well as fellowships/grants from Bread Loaf, Kenyon College, Tin House, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, and Millay Colony, among others. His first book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, was published by Copper Canyon in 2019.

Hard Damage by Aria Aber

“Aber is not afraid of erudition or the hard labor of crafting poems that peel open in layers; at times, reading her work reminded me of poets who have worked across similarly broad linguistic topographies: Carolyn Forché, Frank Bidart, Paul Celan, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, and others. But Aber’s work here is hardly derivative of those masters. She is her own poet, her own voice, and her debut is my favorite volume of poetry this year.” —The Paris Review (staff picks)

Aria Aber is the author of Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, New Republic, Poetry, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She's been awarded fellowships and prizes from NYU, Kundiman, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing.

99 Nights in Logar by Jamil Kochai

“Funny, razor-sharp, and full of juicy tales that feel urgent and illicit . . . the author has created a singular, resonant voice, an American teenager raised by Old World Afghan storytellers.” —New York Times Book Review

Jamil Jan Kochai is the author of the debut novel , 99 Nights in Logar, which has been shortlisted for the Pen/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel and the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. He was born in an Afghan refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan, but he originally hails from Logar, Afghanistan. He was a Truman Capote Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was awarded the Henfield Prize for Fiction. His fiction has been published, or is forthcoming, in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018, A Public Space, and The Sewanee Review. His essays have been published at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He currently resides in West Sacramento, California.

Koola Lobitos by Ajibola Tolase

“In these poems, written from the careful place of hindsight, he asks us to look back over the nation, its cities, to document the split and hammered bodies, the shores awash in the offspring of the sea: broken collars, oil barrels, white men. What comes to be revealed are those miracles of faith that propel us forward.” —Chekwube Danladi, from the preface of Koola Lobitos

Ajibola Tolase is a Nigerian poet and essayist. He is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work has appeared in American Chordata, LitHub, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

The Party is Here by Georgina Beaty

In this daring debut, Georgina Beaty offers a bold, nuanced look at our turbulent times, fearlessly probing the ambitions and confusions of her generation. Wholly unexpected yet wildly entertaining, The Party Is Here slants the world to speak to the uncanny truth of modern life.

Georgina Beaty is the author of The Party is Here, her début story collection, published by Freehand Books. Her fiction has appeared in New England Review, The Walrus, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, PRISM and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and has been supported by fellowships and writing residencies at MacDowell, the Canadian Film Centre and The Banff Centre. As an actor and playwright, she’s worked with theatres across Canada and internationally. Georgina grew up in the Rocky mountains and currently lives in Berkeley, California where she is a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.

Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang

“The poems in Burying the Mountain are characterized by a wild ekphrastic stream of consciousness, with Shangyang Fang narrating under the influence of classical music, opera, and Baroque and avant-garde painting, while reinventing myths and fairy tales.” —Poetry Foundation

Shangyang Fang grew up in Chengdu, China, and composes poems both in English and Chinese. After completing his degree in civil engineering at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, he became a poetry fellow at Michener Center for Writers. A recipient of the Joy Harjo Poetry Award and Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, his debut collection of poems is published by Copper Canyon Press. His name, Shangyang, originating from Chinese mythology, was a one-legged bird whose dance brought forth flood and rain.

All the Flowers Kneeling by Paul Tran

“All the Flowers Kneeling maps the journey past bewilderment, to knowing, to, finally, the mystery of unknowing, where…the life we get to choose for ourselves begins.” —Carl Phillips, author of Then The War

Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, published by Penguin Poets. Their work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, Good Morning America, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes with Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. Paul is the first Asian American since 1993—and first transgender poet ever—to win the Nuyorican Poets Café Grand Slam, placing top 10 at the Individual World Poetry Slam and top 2 at the National Poetry Slam. A recipient of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is a Visiting Faculty in Poetry at Pacific University MFA in Writing.

A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann

“A book of love poems that consciously and subversively hearken back to Shakespeare’s sonnets, marking Hofmann’s position as one of our necessary poets of erotic desire. These short lyrics come together in their discussion of geography, painting, sculpture, and classical music as if to say that love (that queer love!) is indeed as immortal as a poem. Or as Hofmann himself writes, ‘There is so much to say. It may take until night.’” —Jericho Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Tradition

Richie Hofmann's new book of poems, A Hundred Lovers, is published by Alfred A. Knopf (2022). He is the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015), winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award, and a recipient of the Pushcart Prize and the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, among other honors. His poems appear recently in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and the New York Review of Books. A 2017-19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is currently Jones Lecturer in Poetry.

The Red Arrow by William Brewer

"The Red Arrow is hypnotic, heartbreaking, and shot through with a fierce, determined joy. William Brewer has a talent for dark comedy, and for the sort of defamiliarization that can make one feel somehow more attuned and alive. A beautiful trip through a world made new." —Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, selected for a 2016 Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Nation, New England Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Sewanee Review, and other journals. Formerly a Stegner Fellow, he is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.