July 2025 Faculty Lectures from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Now Available

The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College recently celebrated its annual summer residency in Swannanoa, NC this July. The residency featured inspiring lectures and classes from both faculty and graduating students. And writers and readers can access the wonderful craft discussions and lectures from the MFA Program for Writers faculty online here. All MFA Store proceeds directly support graduate student scholarships in the MFA Program for Writers.

Rita Banerjee’s Opening Lecture “Writing Towards Psychic Heat,” asks, “When writing towards psychic heat, is the only way out through?” Given the kinds of social traumas a reader and writer may have experienced or witnessed in their lives, this talk offers four alternative craft techniques and strategies that allow writers to write towards significant moments of emotional and psychic tension within their poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Some authors, studied in this talk, who offer an array of strategies to write towards psychic heat include Robert Frost, Brandon Taylor, Roxane Gay, Haruki Murakami, Arundhati Roy, Ocean Vuong, Patrick Rosal, Carmen Maria Machado, Rainer Maria Rilke, Alokeranjan Dasgupta, Jibanananda Das, Subhas Mukhopadhyay, Gillian Flynn, and Marcel Proust.

The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers store features a rich archive of faculty lectures and craft discussions from January 1992 – July 2025, and can be accessed here: warrenwilsonmfa.org/store/

July 2024 Faculty Lectures from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Now Available

The MFA Program for Writers recently celebrated its annual summer residency at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina. The residency featured inspiring lectures and classes from both faculty and graduating students. And writers and readers can access the wonderful craft discussions and lectures from the MFA Program for Writers faculty online here. Rita Banerjee’s Opening Lecture, “Narrative Design from World Literature: the Kishōtenketsu and West African Griot Tradition,” explores how we can expand our craft knowledge and technique as writers by studying narrative design from world literature. The Japanese kishōtenketsu offers a new way to compose a poem or story beyond the Western emphasis on the plot triangle or Aristotelian idea of “plot is action.” Likewise, the West African Griot Tradition emphasizes the communal aspect of storytelling and notes the import of the storyteller and listener in the creation of a tale the sustains the history of a community and imagines its future. Some authors studied in the talk include Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, E.J. Koh, Ocean Vuong, Samuel Kọ́láwọ́lé, Yaa Gyasi, Teju Cole, and JJJJJerome Ellis.

The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers store features a rich archive of faculty lectures and craft discussions from January 1992 – July 2024, and can be accessed here: https://www.wwcmfa.org/store/

January 2024 Faculty Lectures from MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College Now Available

The MFA Program for Writers recently celebrated its annual winter residency at the Blue Ridge Assembly, the site of the original Black Mountain College in Black Mountain, North Carolina. The residency featured inspiring lectures and classes from both faculty and graduating students. And writers and readers can access the wonderful craft discussions and lectures from the MFA Program for Writers faculty online here. Rita Banerjee’s Opening Lecture, “Translating the World, Translating Ourselves,” explores why translation is such a vital aesthetic, psychic, and embodied craft tool for creative writers. In translating our experiences and ourselves onto the page, we as writers become more aware of the metaphors we live by and can ask ourselves “What is the story behind my story, essay, or poem?” Some authors studied in the talk include Basho, Agyeya, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Bishop, Rudyard Kipling, James Baldwin, Yoko Tawada, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers store features a rich archive of faculty lectures and craft discussions from January 1992 – January 2024, and can be accessed here: https://www.wwcmfa.org/store/

Bon Mot Radio feat. Rita Banerjee & Hunger Mountain, Issue 25: Art Saves

Rita Banerjee will be be featured on WGDR Radio’s “Bon Mot” program at 5 pm EST on Sunday, August 20, 2023.  The radio program will air on 91.1 and 91.7 FM Vermont, and can be found in archive here. The show is hosted by Rick Argan and Banerjee will be be reading from her poetry collection Echo in Four Beats and her new memoir manuscript on female cool. The show will also feature readings from Hunger Mountain, Issue 25: Art Saves, which was edited and curated by Erin Stalcup and features poetry, fiction, nonfiction, graphic literature, and hybrid work from the first 25 years of Hunger Mountain literary magazine. The reading also features faculty and students reading from Hunger Mountain: Art Saves from the MFA in Writing & Publishing program at VCFA in Spring 2021. You can listen to the broadcast here.

KCAW Raven Radio’s “The Library Show feat. Rita Banerjee” airs May 7, 2023 – 10:30 am AKDT

During the the Tongass Mist Writing Retreat (April 12-16, 2023) in Sitka, Alaska, Visiting Rita Banerjee sat down with Brooke Shafer, one of the hosts of “The Library Show” on Raven Radio (KCAW, 104.7 FM Sitka, Alaska). Brooke Shafer asked Rita Banerjee about her favorite books, current reads, what drew her to writing, what it’s like to teach creative writing, and the memoir and manifesto on female cool that she currently working on. Banerjee also got a chance to read from “Cool as Kin,” a new chapter from her memoir on-air.

KCAW Raven Radio will be airing Brooke Shafer’s interview and conversation with Rita Banerjee on Sunday, May 7, 10:30 am Alaska Time (2:30 pm EDT, 11:30 am PDT). And you can listen to “The Library Show” broadcast live (or download it) on May 7 on Raven Radio at:

https://www.kcaw.org/program-schedule/

Rutgers Writers House Alumni Reading feat. Rita Banerjee, Cassandra Gillig, and Becca Klaver Now Live

The Rutgers Writers House Alumni Reading featuring Rita Banerjee, Cassandra Gillig, and Becca Klaver is now live on YouTube. You can watch the reading online here:

Writers House is an undergraduate learning community at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Writers House provides a gateway to the experience of creativity and serves as a laboratory for developing expression in all the media of the twenty-first century. At Writers House, students can work on poetry, fiction, drama, creative nonfiction, autobiography, grant-writing, nature writing, and screenwriting. They can also collaborate on documentary film-making, multimedia composition, and web design. The goal of Writers House is to give students direct access to writing’s constructive and life-changing powers for personal and social good. The entrance to Writers House has no doors. All are welcome.

Featured Authors:

RITA BANERJEE is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Co-Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and Publishing program at LIU Brooklyn. She is the author of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative WritingEcho in Four Beats, the novella“A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps, and Cracklers at Night. Her work appearsin Hunger Mountain, Isele, Nat. Brut., Poets & Writers, Academy of American Poets, Los Angeles Review of Books, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is a co-writer of Burning Down the Louvre (2022), a documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto on female cool, and one of the opening chapters of this new memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays.You can follow her work at ritabanerjee.com

CASSANDRA GILLIG is a writer, archivist, and musician who lives in Kansas City. She writes about policing and gentrification for the Kansas City Defender and co-organizes the Stray Cat Film Center, where she runs the Institute for Whoopi Goldberg Studies. She graduated from Rutgers in 2014 with degrees in English and WGS and still owes $19,000 in student loans. More at orlandogillig.blogspot.com.

BECCA KLAVER is a writer, teacher, editor, scholar, and literary collaboration conjurer. She is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Midwinter Constellation, a book cowritten with 31 other poets in homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, will be published in 2022. As an editor, she cofounded Switchback Books; is currently coediting the anthology Electric Gurlesque; and has created pop-up journals such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants and Across the Social Distances. She lives in Chicago. For more see: https://beccaklaver.com/.

“Trochees: The Horse Beat” Lecture Narrated by Rita Banerjee

In honor of a guest lecture at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Los Angeles in January 2016, poet Rita Banerjee created the presentation “Trochees: The Horse Beat,” which can be viewed on YouTube. This mini-lecture, which was presented as part of Rita Banerjee’s class “Poetry & What’s at Stake,” features a study of the trochaic form in English poetry with a close reading of William Blake’s “The Tyger.” The lecture is available to the public and for classroom use on YouTube here.