Creative Writing Commons^™

Ships In Houston, Nadia Villafuerte, Julie Ann Ward

Undiscovered Americas

Ships in Houston by Nadia Villafuerte, translated by Julie Ann Ward, is a harrowing and heartrending collection of fifteen stories that bring to life characters who, though they exist independently from one another, inhabit the same world: Mexico’s southern border. Using acute attention to language, such as various dialects and slang, to create a nuanced and varied mood and setting, Villafuerte’s stories track exotic dancers, sex workers, truck drivers, drug dealers, immigration officials, and even a mayor’s daughter to create compelling fictions rooted in the harsh realities of borderlands that many choose to overlook. While the US’s southern border with …

Creole Sketches, Lafcadio Hearn, Charles Woodward Hutson

Zea E-Books Collection

New Orleans in 1878 was the most exotic and cosmopolitan city in North America. An international port, with more than 200,000 inhabitants, it was open to French, Spanish, Mexican, South American, and West Indian cultural influences, and home to a thriving population descended from free African Americans. It was also a battleground in the fight against yellow fever (malaria) and in the political upheavals that followed the end of Reconstruction. The continued influx of Anglo-Americans and the renewed ascendancy of white supremacists threatened to overwhelm the local blend of languages, races, and cultures that enlivened the unique Creole character of …

Treading The Winepress; Or, A Mountain Of Misfortune, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, Jean Macdonald

Undiscovered Americas

“Every life hath its chapter of sorrow. No matter how rich the gilding or fair the pages of the volume, Trouble will stamp it with his sable signet.”

So begins the novel Treading the Winepress; or, A Mountain of Misfortune by Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, which, had it appeared in book form in 1885–1886 instead of serialized in The Boston Advocate, would have been the second novel published by a black woman in the United States. Instead, Allen has been mostly forgotten by literary history. Now, thanks to the painstaking efforts of editors Gabrielle Brown, Eric Willey, and Jean …

Gish Jen: Vocation Of The Writer (Library Resources), Holy Cross Libraries

Library Resources for Campus Events

A bibliography of resources available through the Holy Cross Libraries which provide additional information related to "Gish Jen: Vocation of the Writer" a lecture by award-winning author and speaker Gish Jen. The conference is sponsored by the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J. Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, the Creative Writing Program, and Asian Studies and was held at the College of the Holy Cross on February 27, 2018.

Faroosh And Elina, Faroosh, Elina, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Faroosh was a cameraman for a private television program in Afghanistan working on a documentary about the Taliban. When he and his crew were discovered, the Taliban attacked them and he and his wife fled to Turkey, walking 12 hours to get there. Upon arrival the police arrested and harassed them. Turkey was not a safe place. After several suicide bombings in the area, they decided to move on to Greece, where they are in a refugee camp without any progress in their situation. They have no money to move forward and no ability to work and the economic situation …

Natural-Born Proud, S. R. Martin Jr.

All USU Press Publications

A young man from Monterey and his younger brother go on their first deer hunt with their minister father and his friends. The setting is 1950s northern California, in country where, from the right height, one can see Mt. Shasta in one direction, Mt. Lassen in the other. It is a region of small, insular towns, and although it is a familiar hunting ground for the Reverend and his buddies, not everyone there welcomes black hunters. Father and son both shoulder their pride, and a racial confrontation seems inevitable.

Among the lessons young Satch learns is the sometime advantage of …

The Arc And The Sediment, Christine Allen-Yazzie

All USU Press Publications

Gretta Bitsilly, gin-steeped mother of two and self-proclaimed expert at standing outside the margins of ethnicity and peering in, has been all but eclipsed by the world that eludes her--as a wife, a writer, a skeptic in "the other land of Zion," Utah. Gretta has set off to Fort Defiance, Arizona, where she hopes to convince her Navajo husband, who has escaped not from his family but from alcoholism, to come home.

Over a sputtering two-steps-forward, one-step-back desert journey, Gretta is diverted by chance, seizures, an inconstant memory, and the disjointed character of her irresolute quest.

She is fueled by …

[Introduction To] From Within The Frame: Storytelling In African-American Studies, Bertram D. Ashe

Bookshelf

The book explores the written representation of African-American oral storytelling from Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison to James Alan McPherson, Toni Cade Bambara and John Edgar Wideman. At its core, the book compares the relationship of the "frame tale" - an inside-the-text storyteller telling a tale to an inside-the-text listener - with the relationship between the outside-the-text writer and reader. The progression is from Chesnutt's 1899 frame texts, in which the black spoken voice is contained by a white narrator/listener, to Bambara's sixties-era example of a "frameless" spoken voice text, to Wideman's neo-frame text of the late …

Newe Hupia: Shoshoni Poetry Songs, Beverly Crum, Earl Crum, Jon P. Dayley

All USU Press Publications

This collection presents written texts of songs in Shoshoni and English, with both figurative and literal translations, and is packaged with a CD containing performances of the songs by Earl and Beverly Crum. The songs fall into several categories based on the contexts of their performances, such as dance songs, medicine songs, and handgame songs. The texts are framed with an introduction and commentary discussing the cultural background, meaning, forms, and performance contexts of the songs; Shoshoni language; and methodology. Glossaries of Shoshoni terms are appended. As the first major linguistic study of Shoshoni songs, Newe Hupia is an important …

Que Tal: An Anthology Of Student Writings, Mexican American Graduate Studies, San Jose State University

¡Qué Tal!

Special Edition

Erogenous Zone, David Rice

Special Collections

Content Warning: Poems are sexually explicit. All were written while the author was imprisoned and some reference prison.

Erogenous Zone: sensual poetry was written by David Rice (Mondo). "David Rice has concentrated on the beauty of people relating to each other sexually and has also given us an erotic view of the interplay between the forces and elements of the universe." Erogenous Zone was one of a number of creative works Mondo produced. He published numerous short stories, poems, plays, and newspaper columns during his imprisonment.

Mondo, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, was a member of the Omaha Black Panthers …