Maryfrances Wagner

Backstories

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Maryfrances Wagner's Backstories might be called a short story collection in verse. Individually, these unforgettable poems pack the power of the best short fiction, and as a whole they tell the story of so many of today's American high school classrooms, the keen intelligence nestled in the most disadvantaged students, the circumstances that cause students to prefer detention so they might have a quiet place to do homework rather than the family motel room of 6 siblings, or so they might find a place to sleep between before-and-after-school jobs. Wagner's students' backstories include a teenage mother dropping out to care for an unplanned daughter, a bullied student beaten unconscious in the bathroom, another gaining attention by driving his prom date and himself to a fast and fiery death. And all the time in the background if not the front of the classroom is the patient yet demanding teacher with the strength of character to ask for the best from each student, fielding the questions: Why do we have to study grammar? We already know//how to speak and understand each other...We never stop learning in here do we?//Is it too late to drop this class? Although the individual backstories are drawn with a fiction writer's gifts for character development, setting, etc., the writer is also a poet who can speak of young blue jays with more stomach than wing, and A dozen trapped backstories//fly[ing] from an attic trunk//like moths//finished with wool. Who can ask, [W]hat would you do in my situation? This is a book of courage.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Spartan Press
• Seitenzahl: 82
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. Februar 2025
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 140mm x 5mm
• Gewicht: 116g
• ISBN-13: 9781958182949
• ISBN-10: 195818294X
• Artikelnr.: 73412292

Autorenporträt

Maryfrances Wagner's books include Salvatore's Daughter, Light Subtracts Itself, Red Silk, winner of the Thorpe Menn Book Award for Literary Excellence,Dioramas, Pouf, The Silence of Red Glass, and The Immigrants' New Camera. Poems have appeared in many literary magazines to include New Letters, MidwestQuarterly, Birmingham Review, Louisville Review, Laurel Review, Voices in Italian Americana, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary MulticulturalPoetry (Penguin Books), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), Bearing Witness, The Dream Book, An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women(American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation), et. al. She and her husband Greg Field co-edited New Letters Review of Books, and she co-editeda number of anthologies including The Whirlybird Anthology of Greater Kansas City Writers with David and Judy Ray. She is President of The Writers Place in Kansas City.She also chairs the TWP programming committee where she helps sponsor and promote emerging and established writers and co-edits I-70 Review..She also served on theAmerican Poets Series board as well as on the Kansas City Creates board where she brought togethermusic, poetry, and dance. The Missouri Arts Council selected her as Independent Artist of 2020. In the words of Denise Low,"Maryfrances Wagner is a literary advocateand community builder," and she continues to help support the literary arts through The Writers Place and throughout the Greater Kansas City area.Maryfrances was the sixth Missouri Poet Laureate from 2021- 2023. Maryfrances has taught academic, expository, analytical, and creative writing at both the high school and college level, and she has taught writingworkshops at all levels (3rd grade through graduate school) and has received local and state recognition for Excellence in Teaching. She is availableto facilitate a wide variety of workshops and to give readings. She and her husband, Greg Field, live with two rescued dogs named Lucille Clifton and Annie Sexton.