How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse

by Aruni Kashyap (Contributor)

How Dare We! a multicultural creative writing discourse offers a much-needed corrective to the usual dry and uninspired creative writing pedagogy. The collection asks us to consider questions, such as "What does it mean to work through resistance from supposed mentors, to face rejection from publishers and classmates, and to stand against traditions that silence you?" and "How can writers and teachers even begin to make diversity matter in meaningful ways on the page, in the classroom, and on our bookshelves?" The expanded 2nd edition includes six new works, Creating Literary Spaces, that reach beyond the personal, beyond the present, into unknown spaces that make a difference. How Dare We! Write is an inspiring collection of intellectually rigorous lyric essays and innovative writing exercises; it opens up a path for inquiry, reflection, understanding, and creativity that is ultimately healing. The testimonies provide a hard-won context for their innovative paired writing experiments that are, by their very nature, generative. -- Cherise A. Pollard, PhD, Professor of English, West Chester University of Pennsylvania So-called "creative writing" classes are highly politicized spaces, but no one says so; to acknowledge this obvious fact would be to up-end the aesthetics, cultural politics (ideology) and economics on which most educational institutions are founded. How Dare We! Write , a brilliant interventive anthology of essays, breaks this silence. -- Maria Damon, Pratt Institute of Art; co-editor of Poetry and Cultural A Reader How Dare We! Write is a collection of brave voices calling out to writers of color no matter how lonely, you are not alone; you are one in a sea of change, swimming against the currents. -- Kao Kalia Yang, author of The A Hmong Family Memoir , and The Song Poet , a 2017 Minnesota Book Award winner How Dare We! Write is a much-needed collection of essays from writers of color that reminds us that our stories need to be told, from addressing academic gatekeepers, embracing our identities, the effects of the oppressor's tongue on our psyche and to the personal narratives that help us understand who we are. ---Rodrigo Sanchez-Chavarria, writer, spoken word poet/performer and contributing author to A Good Time for the Race In Minnesota Learn more at //blog.SherryQuanLee.com From Modern History Press www.ModernHistoryPress.com

266 pages, Paperback

Published July 18, 2022

About the author

Aruni Kashyap is the author of The Way You Want To Be Loved, The House With a Thousand Stories, and the forthcoming How to Date a Fanatic. Along with editing a collection of stories called How to Tell the Story of an Insurgency, he is the translator of four novels from Assamese to English. A 2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, he is also the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Faculty Research Grants in the Humanities and Arts Program, the Arts Lab Faculty Fellowship, and the Charles Wallace India Trust Scholarship for Creative Writing to the University of Edinburgh, his poetry collection, There is No Good Time for Bad News, was nominated for the 58th Georgia Author of the Year Awards 2022, a finalist for the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and the Four Way Books Levis Award in Poetry.
His translations, which have been shortlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation and VOW Book Awards 2024, include The Bronze Sword of Tengphakhri Tehsildar by Indira Goswami (Zubaan), My Poems Are Not for Your Ad Campaign by Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Penguin), An Illuminated Valley by Dipak Kumar Barkakaty (Penguin), and Ten Love Stories and a Story of Despair (Westland). He has served as a visiting writer at Lander University, Minnesota State University, Converse University, The College of William & Mary, Valdosta State University, Dibrugarh University, Assam Don Bosco University, and delivered the Tagore Lecture in Modern Indian Literature at Cornell University. His short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Granta, The Boston Review, Electric Literature, Catapult, Bitch Media, The Kenyon Review, The LitHub, The Oxford Anthology of Writings from the Northeast, The New York Times, The Guardian UK, and others. He also writes in Assamese and is the author of a novel, Noikhon Etia Duroit, and three novellas. He is an Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Georgia, Athens.