Campus Stories - Creative Writing
Poet Eavan Boland elected to the Royal Irish Academy
The Royal Irish Academy elected English professor and acclaimed poet EAVAN BOLAND as an honorary member. Boland, the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and director of the Creative Writing Program, was among 28 new members admitted for “their exceptional contribution to the sciences, humanities and social sciences as well as to public service,”…
Louis Menand unmasks the rock god in his cultural history of rock’n’roll
Who invented rock’n’roll? It’s not who you think. At the Stanford Humanities Center’s 2018 Harry Camp Memorial Lecture, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and cultural critic Louis Menand exposed rock’n’roll’s origin myths, shedding light on the power of media to shape cultural myths today. In his lecture, titled “Conditions for the Possibility of Rock’n’Roll: An Exercise in Cultural History,” Menand…
Stanford’s spring quarter guest artists
Guest artists are all over campus this spring. Indie rock band Glass Animals play Stanford Stadium; the open-air literary celebration Stories of Exile, Reckoning and Hope takes place on the main stage in White Plaza; Mina Morita directs Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechwan in Roble Studio Theater; and Stanford Live’s popular Cabaret series continues in Bing’s cozy…
Stanford senior turned novelist talks about her book, “Frat Girl”
Menlo Park’s Kepler’s Books and Magazines recently helped senior KILEY ROACHE launch her new novel, Frat Girl. Here is how the website Goodreads describes the book: “For Cassandra Davis, the F-word is fraternity – specifically, Delta Tau Chi, a house on probation and on the verge of being banned from campus. Accused of offensive, sexist behavior, they have one year to clean…
Stanford Stegner Fellows lead and influence with words
Imagination can be supported. Hands can be guided, and craft can be improved. The workshop can reveal the best a writer has to offer. Wallace Stegner founded the Stanford Creative Writing Program and Writing Fellowships in 1946. (Image credit: Mary Stegner) These beliefs have been the guiding principles of the Stegner Fellows program since its inception…
Stanford Professor Chang-rae Lee on “Writing Across and Through Gender” at the Clayman Institute’s Artist’s Salon
How does a writer imbue his characters with a gender, gendered behaviors and attributes, that seem authentic, and not stereotypical, to the reader? How do the social aspects of gender inform the fictional universe of his novel? For award-winning novelist and Stanford professor Chang-rae Lee, the ultimate freedom in writing across and through gender means…
Stanford lecturer earns fellowship from National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts recently awarded AUSTIN SMITH, a Jones lecturer in the English Department at Stanford, with a creative writing fellowship. Austin Smith Smith, a former Wallace Stegner fellow, was one of 36 writers nationwide who received the 2018 Creative Writing Fellowship, according to the National Endowment for the Arts. The annual fellowship…
20.8% of the 2017 MacArthur Fellows were Stanford guest artists within the last year
Stanford congratulates the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winners who recently spent time on campus engaging with students, faculty and the public. Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist NJIDEKA AKUNYILI CROSBY, whose work tells elaborate and delicate stories of her life, was in conversation with Jodi Roberts, the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Curator for Modern and…
Fall quarter guest artists
One of the ways that Stanford is creating opportunities for meaningful engagement with the arts for students and the university community is by inviting over 100 artists each year to campus to create, perform and discuss their work. This fall quarter the roster of guest artists includes comedian and political commentator Samantha Bee in conversation…
Stanford Honors in the Arts capstone program evolves with a new Mellon grant
Stanford University has been awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to support the development of a new undergraduate, interdisciplinary program in the arts to be administered by Stanford Arts Institute. Honors in the Arts students present Bacchae, an immersive theatrical experience utilizing locations across the Stanford campus. (Image credit: Kristen Stipanov) The $400,000 grant provides support for…
Student Arts Grants: A Year in Photos 2016-17
This year’s Student Arts Grants supported a wide range of projects across the Stanford campus. The projects covered many genres including devised performance, contemporary dance, printmaking, classical and contemporary plays, documentary and fiction film shorts, musical theater, painting, photography, and more. Many of this year’s grantees utilized the new Roble Arts Gym as a rehearsal/work space as…
On writing and identity: an interview with author and professor Chang-rae Lee
In the fall of 2016, acclaimed author Chang-rae Lee joined Stanford as the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program. He was previously at Princeton University as a creative writing professor and director of their Program in Creative Writing. Lee moved with his family from South Korea…
2017 Student Submitted Artwork
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Author Junot Díaz promotes community activism, fight against oppression in lecture at Stanford
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist Junot Díaz encouraged people of color, undocumented immigrants and other minority group members to stick together and help each other during a turbulent political climate as part of his lecture Wednesday evening at Stanford. “We must steal fire because we must transform this world that conserves and hoards fire for…
Good books, like teachers, acknowledge children’s lives, says author Jacqueline Woodson
In her National Book Award-winning verse autobiography, Brown Girl Dreaming, Jacqueline Woodson writes that she was a slow reader, an exasperating student who sometimes missed the point of a teacher’s lesson. Yet by age 7, Woodson knew that she wanted to be a writer. Those two facts seem contradictory but in fact anchor her writing…
First-year student pens stories of children in Syria
Syria’s civil war has taken a devastating toll on children. Stanford freshman EMMA ABDULLAH puts a young, human face on that tragedy with her book, The Blue Box, which details the plight of Syrian children during the country’s six-year civil war. Published in 2014, the work is a collection of short stories and poems, and…
