This week in my writing class we’re reading essays and two poems by Christian Wiman, plus a piece of criticism from The New Yorker about his collection My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. Wiman’s poem “After the Diagnosis” describes an apple sapling bent to the ground, observed by the poem’s speaker through “one clear pane” (as he […]

This week in my writing class we read an excerpt from Jennifer Percy’s Demon Camp, “We Kill Ourselves Because We Are Haunted,” published at Guernica. This weekend’s New York Times Magazine contains Percy’s latest, “Meet the American Vigilantes Who Are Fighting ISIS.” Let’s all read. Photo credit: Moises Saman/Magnum, for The New York Times

A student from my seminar on David Foster Wallace wrote this weekend asking, for a friend, what book I might recommend for the best, first taste. Since I teach his non-fiction, my recommendation will bend in that direction. That said, the novel Infinite Jest is a good and common place to start. More of Wallace’s best essays are contained in A Supposedly Fun Thing […]

With an excerpt from Jen Percy‘s Demon Camp, published at Guernica, on the docket for next week, I’m encouraging any interested students to read this harrowing account of the lives of Afghan women, “Love Crimes,” published last January in Harper’s. Photo credit: Andrew Quilty/Oculi/Agence VU

This morning in my writing class, I mentioned the work of Nathan Schneider, a Catholic writer I’m proud to call a friend. The essay we spoke about, a profile of “Sister Monica,” a nun with a secret ministry for transgender people, was originally published on the website of  Al Jazeera America. Nathan has also recently written for the Catholic weekly America, where he is […]

This week in my writing class, we’re reading Peter Manseau’s 2005 essay “Call Waiting,” which was published in The New York Times Magazine. Manseau has published this week an article in The Atlantic to mark the visit of Pope Francis to the United States. This essay reminds me of another Atlantic piece about the pope, published in 2006, by Paul […]

My weekend reading will be Ta-Nehisi Coates’s long Atlantic story, “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.” If you read it, too, please post some thoughts here.

  A report today from American Theater shows that Ayad Akhtar, whose Pulitzer-winning Disgraced my first-year writing class has read this semester, will be the most produced playwright of the 2015-16 season.

There’s little more to say than that this is one of my favorite images of an all-time favorite writer, James Baldwin. My first-year writing class will be reading his book The Fire Next Time later this semester.

The cover illustration of the men at the tree is by Croatian graphic novelist Danijel Žeželj, who drew this image to accompany my most recent piece from Harper’s, “Our Common Trouble.”