Poetry

"Meditation at Lagunitas" - Robert Hass
"Prelapsarian" - Leila Chatti
"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" - James Wright
"The Colonel" - Carolyn Forché
"All I want in life is to be someone's Kraken" - Grace Q. Song
"Introduction to Poetry" - Billy Collins
"Swimming Lessons" - Sarah Fathima Mohammed
"100 Bells" - Tarfia Faizullah
"A Morning Person" - Mary Ruefle
"Wild Geese" - Mary Oliver
"Good Dog" - Steven Duong
"May to December" - Megan Fernandes
"The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings." - Donika Kelly
"Return Home" - Daniel Liu
"Notes from the Ruined City" - Aria Aber
"One Art" - Elizabeth Bishop
"The night is darkening round me" - Emily Brontë
"The Leash" - Ada Limón
"The Spring Has Many Silences" - Laura Riding Jackson
"Let Them Not Say" - Jane Hirshfield
"Southern Sonnet" - Zeina Hashem Beck

Fiction

Flash

"Find X" - Grace Q. Song, Passages North
"In Which Ms. Swan Suffers Clarity" - Elaine Hsieh Chou, Black Warrior Review

Short Story

Things Boys Do - Pemi Aguda, *Nightmare *
Mermaid River - Alexia Arthurs, Sewanee
When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine - Jhumpa Lahiri
Girls, At Play - Celeste Ng, Bellevue

Nonfiction

"The Shape of Emptiness" - Brenda Miller
"Still" - Casey Mulligan Walsh

Craft Essays

On Dialogue - IYWS
Trapdoors & Lit Fuses - Connor Yeck
Craft Notes on a Failure Poetics - Madeleine Wattenberg
Mystery & Birds: 5 Ways to Practice Poetry - Ada Limón
Twenty-Two Poem Hacks - Carmen Giménez Smith

Novels

Reading

Poppy War Series - R.F. Kuang
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous - Ocean Vuong

To Read

Ninth House Series - Leigh Bardugo
The Vanishing Half - Brit Bennet
Minor Feelings - Cathy Park Hong

Recommended Reads

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Grishaverse Series - Leigh Bardugo
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Ender's Game Quintet - Orson Scott Card
Trust Exercise - Susan Choi
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Mila Kundera
Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
Mere Christianity - C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed - C.S. Lewis
The Four Loves - C.S. Lewis
Everything I Never Told You - Celeste Ng
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
A Voice in the Wind Series - Francine Rivers
Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
Conversations With Friends - Sally Rooney
Normal People - Sally Rooney

Lit MagsFoundry
Guernica
Kenyon Review
Muzzle Magazine
Shenandoah
Split Lip
THRUSH
Tinderbox Journal
POETRY
West Branch

WritersPoetsAria Aber
Leila Chatti
Chen Chen
Satya Dash
Natalie Diaz
Steven Duong
Tarfia Faizullah
Jessica Kim
Ada Limón
Daniel Liu
Sarah Fathima Mohammed
Mary Oliver
Ottavia Paluch
Gaia Rajan
Mary Ruefle
Simon Shieh
Grace Q. Song
Lydia Wei
Ocean VuongShort Fiction WritersJhumpa Lahiri
Grace Q. Song
Shreya VikramEssayistsC.S. Lewis

"Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you....You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours."
Saint Augustine, "Confessions"

"Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence (Beethoven's music, death under a train) into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual's life....Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress....it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
Milan Kundera, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."
C.S. Lewis, "The Four Loves"

“Remember the impossible eventfulness of time, transformation and emotion packed like gunpowder into the barrel. Remember the dilation and diffusion, the years within days. Theirs were endless; lives flowered and died between waking and noon.”
Susan Choi, "Trust Exercise"