Upcoming Events: Where You Can Find Us
Here’s a look at our upcoming online events, plus third-party event where you can find our authors and editors! [You may also view past events by using the month view and scrolling back.]
STORIES ON SUNDAY: Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay (ed. Heidi Czerwiec & Lee Horikoshi Roriaugh)
This Stories on Sunday explores Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts for Contemporary Writers and Teachers, edited by Heidi Czerwiec & Lee Horikoshi Roriaugh. Ticket info below the description.
This is the first time we’re spotlighting a craft book on Stories on Sunday, and we are excited to change things up a bit. We’ll learn about the lyric essay form itself, discuss how the anthology came together, and hear excerpts the book, including example essays.
About the Series: Stories on Sundays are bi-monthly(ish) readings from a recent/forthcoming work of creative nonfiction intertwined with an interview + audience Q&A. This is event is free or by donation; Your registration helps fund our contributor payments and other costs associated with running our journal.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The fifth volume in the immensely popular Field Guide series, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay gives readers an extraordinary window into the methods of 26 expert practitioners at the leading edge of this ever-evolving genre.
With original craft essays, exercises, and examples, each contributor offers reflection and instruction on how lyric essays can be constructed and what makes them unique. As experts in the field, they offer their various approaches to creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function, meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language and the resonances of sound and imagery. The anthology’s expertise spans possible forms (braid, fragment, hermit crab, zuihitsu), lyric techniques (anaphora, fractal repetition, word associations, use of white space), and lyric processes (incorporating research or visual elements, engineering leaps, sustaining a longform lyric essay).
Editors Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh further illuminate the genre in their introduction, exploring the history of the lyric essay and its vital place in contemporary literature. This Field Guide is an indispensable addition to the bookshelf of any reader, writer, or instructor intrigued by this inventive and expressive genre. Learn more about the book and see the list of featured essayists.
In addition to co-editing this new craft book:
Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord, and the lyric essay collection Fluid States, selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press’ 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. She writes and teaches in Minneapolis, where she is senior editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com.
Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei whose most recent book, unMothered, unTongued: Lyric Essays—winner of the 2024 AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction—was published by UGA Press in 2025. They are the author of five volumes of poetry, most recently Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50, and her fiction collection, Reveal Codes, winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award, was published by Moon City Press in 2023. Horikoshi Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of the National Poetry Series.
All Stories on Sundays guests have a connection to Hippocampus Magazine; Heidi is a past contributor.
