Replay: Kim Addonizio shares the Five Things She's Learned about Shaping the Personal Essay
Check out the first five minutes of her recent class.
"You don’t need to have some dramatic story to tell—just a piece of the human condition (which, come to think of it, is pretty dramatic; no one gets out of this alive). If you’re short on ideas, we’ll do a fun, brief writing exercise that will give you a lot of seeds for new work. I’ll also talk a bit about the opportunities and challenges of this kind of personal writing, and try to answer a few of your questions."
– Kim Addonizio, Five Things I’ve Learned about Shaping the Personal Essay
In Five Things I’ve Learned about Shaping the Personal Essay, Kim shares all she’s learned about the opportunities personal writing presents for both writers and readers. She draws on the experience of her own writing – and her own life – offering practical tips, insights, and strategies for transforming life experiences into engaging and compelling narratives.
Kim is a poet, fiction writer and essayist who has authored twelve books over a writing career that began with her first published collection of poetry at age forty. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from Penthouse to the New York Times to the New Yorker and Paris Review.
Her essay collection, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life, was hailed by Booklist as a “rollicking and wrenching memoir-in-essays. . . Always vital, clever, and seductive, Addonizio, a secular Anne Lamott, a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham, delivers shock and awe, humor and pathos with panache.” Addonizio has been award two NEA Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. Her most recent book of poems is Now We’re Getting Somewhere. Exit Opera is forthcoming from Norton in September 2024. She is at work on a new collection of essays, Anywhere But Me.
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