MFA in Creative Writing: Faculty / Rainier Writing Workshop

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Fleda Brown

Fleda Brown

Poetry, Nonfiction

http://fledabrown.com/

Profile

Professional

Emphases

Poetry

Nonfiction

Responsibilities

Mentor. Workshops and classes in poetry and nonfiction.

Statement: "I've taught many kinds of workshops – one-shot 3-hour sessions, weekend retreats, and semester-long creative writing classes. Sometimes students come into a workshop simply wanting a push, sometimes they need help finding their voices.Everyone talks about 'finding a voice,' as if we all knew what this means. We don’t. I don’t. What I can do in a workshop is to help students allow themselves to be clumsy, foolish, and sometimes nuts in their writing, while loosely hanging onto the reins. What are the reins? I don't know that, either, but we can figure it out by looking closely at the best work we can get our hands on. No one ever had a 'voice' that came from nowhere. It develops partly from bouncing off other voices—the ones in the workshop, and the ones on the page. I dearly love being around when the bounce lands in new territory."

Personal

Biography

Fleda Brown is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Reunion, winner of the 2007 Felix Pollak Poetry Prize, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Driving with Dvorak, a memoir in essays, is published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, Southern Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, and many other journals and anthologies, and they have been used as texts for several prize winning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. In 2004, she won the Ohio State Univ/ The Journal award for creative nonfiction. She has written on teaching poetry and on the craft of writing, and she is co-editor of Critical Essays on D.H. Lawrence (G.K. Hall). She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas and taught at the University of Delaware for 27 years, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She served as poet laureate of Delaware and now lives in Michigan.

Division of HumanitiesMFA in Creative Writing - Low Residency

Rainier Writing Workshop

Fleda Brown

Poetry, Nonfiction

Profile

Professional

Personal

Contact

Faculty