Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, and published his first book at age 16. Jailed three times and sentenced to death…
Personal essays can do many things. They can help us navigate our experiences, our grief, our trauma, or our joy. They can help show others how to navigate these for themselves. And they can unite us—author and reader—in a shared,…
Openings are important in any piece of writing, but they’ve always struck me as particularly important to critical writing. Why? Well, because critical writing bears the burden of always being about something else, often something readers have heard of and…
It was an essay about climate change. At least that is what I wanted the essay to be about. I wrote passionately about finding trash on the trail, the bear hunter who passed us on the road, a meadow in…
In a workshop, the writer Dorothy Allison had us go around the room and all fake an orgasm. She critiqued the authenticity and then had us write a sex scene where sound was present. This idea came up when she…
Writing for the stage offered me an opportunity to explore the mechanics of dialogue. In a play, the spoken word carries a weight that in other genres it shares with written descriptions, insights into situations, references… On stage the word…