Jessica Handler

Jessica Handler's first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir has been named one of "Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read." Her writing has received a "Special Mention" for a 2008 Pushcart Prize. She was awarded a merit scholarship to the inaugural "Writers in Paradise" conference, an honorable mention for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, enjoyed a fellowship at the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts in Rabun Gap, Georgia, and was honored with the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship at the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop.

Her work has appeared in Newsweek, Tin House, The Rumpus.com, Brevity.com, and is forthcoming in New South. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte (N.C.) and a BS in communication from Emerson College, in Boston.

Works by this contributor:

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God's Party Town

Those flaxen evangelicals, imbued with their holy ghost or some such helter-skelter mania, were surely not from Chicago, not of Sweet Home—bused in from Kansas, perchance?
Returning the World to the Workshop: Using Theme

The reasons for my discomfort became clear one September afternoon at the Minnesota State Fair pig judging contest.
Reinvigorating the Creative Writing Workshop Using Blogs

As one student put it: “Too much liberty for me is death.”
Workshop Alternatives

In one fell swoop, this eliminates almost all the problems I’ve encountered in typical workshops.

Interviews

Susie Bright: Interview

Big Sex Little Death focuses most of its pages on Bright’s complicated and sometimes painful history.
Ian Heames: Interview

Ian Heames began printmaking in a sub-basement several floors beneath a library at Oxford.
Brooklyn Copeland: Interview

I started writing poetry as a freshman in high school. I would buy blank notebooks as souvenirs because I found the idea of a bunch of blank pages really appealing.
Linda McCarriston: Interview

According to Linda McCarriston, poetry exists for reasons beyond displays of linguistic or lyrical talent.

Reviews

Half in Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate by Judith Kitchen

Over the course of ten years, Kitchen has jotted notes about photos she found in her family’s scrapbook. She has now collected her writings into a cohesive work accompanied by approximately seventy images.
Water Puppets by Quan Barry

There is a journalistic objectivity to Quan Barry’s new collection of poems, Water Puppets. The poems linger on scenes of profound violence and inhumanity, reporting heavy truths of war, massacre, and disaster.
Neighborhood Register by Marcus Jackson

In Neighborhood Register, Marcus Jackson eloquently establishes a time and place: the American Rust Belt of his adolescence during the late twentieth century.
Tamura Ryuichi: On the Life and Work of a 20th Century Master

Tamura’s work relentlessly pulls us into highly charged and disturbing themes of violence, culpability, and survival.

Blog Posts

Drinkers with a Writing Problem

May 9, 2012
An Eye for an Eye Leaves Everyone Blind

Apr 30, 2012
Flash-Circuit

Apr 26, 2012
Books, Brains, Baboons, Buddhism and Barry White.

Apr 23, 2012