Nick Flynn | |
|---|---|
 Flynn at 2023 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | January 26, 1960 Scituate, Massachusetts, US |
| Occupation |
|
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards |
|
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | |
| www | |
Nick Flynn (born January 26, 1960) is an American writer, playwright, and poet.
Nick Flynn | |
|---|---|
| Flynn at 2023 Texas Book Festival | |
| Born | January 26, 1960 Scituate, Massachusetts, US |
| Occupation |
|
| Notable works |
|
| Notable awards |
|
| Spouse | |
| Children | 1 |
| Website | |
| www | |
Nick Flynn (born January 26, 1960) is an American writer, playwright, and poet.
Nick Flynn was raised by his mother in Scituate, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.
Flynn had no contact with his father throughout most of his childhood and adolescence as his parents separated when he was six months old. [1] As a child, he was discouraged from pursuing a writing career because his father had identified himself as a writer to his mother when they first met. Flynn claims that, along with his father's alcoholism, a reason for his parents' separation was his father's "delusion of greatness" directly connected to his being an artist. Flynn first became an electrician instead of a writer after graduating high school, because of the stigma associated with the latter. [2]
At 20, he was offered a scholarship to study English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studied with Fred Robinson, who was then married to Marilyn Robinson—she would sometimes teach his classes. It was at UMass that Flynn was first exposed to contemporary poetry, in a workshop taught by James Tate. In fall of 1982 Flynn's mother committed suicide. [3] Subsequently unable to continue with his studies, Flynn dropped out of school and ended up working at the Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. He took classes at various colleges and universities over the next several years to finish his undergraduate degree, while living in the Fort Point Channel on a boat he and a friend had renovated.[ citation needed ]
When he was 27, Flynn was unexpectedly reunited with his father at the Pine Street Inn, when his then-homeless father showed up as a "guest". At 29, Flynn began therapy, got sober, and began taking poetry workshops, first with Carolyn Forche, then with Marie Howe. The following year he was awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he became friends with Jacqueline Woodson, Tim Seibles, Paul Lisicky, Mark Doty, Stanley Kunitz, Alan Dugan, Carl Phillips, and others. In 1992, he moved to Brooklyn to pursue his Master of Arts in poetry at New York University. [4] At NYU, he studied with Sharon Olds, Phil Levine, Galway Kinnell, William Matthews, and Allen Ginsberg.[ citation needed ]
From 1992 to 1999, he was a member of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University, in which he served as an educator and consultant in New York public schools. [5] He left Brooklyn in 1999 for a second fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, where he finished his first book of poems, Some Ether (2000), begun ten years earlier. That same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as an Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Fellowship, which allowed him to live in Rome from 2001 to 2003. While in Rome he finished work on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City , as well as traveling extensively, mainly to Dublin, Paris, and Tanzania. It was in Rome where he met and became friends with Austrian filmmaker Hubert Sauper. Flynn collaborated on Sauper's Academy Awards nominated documentary Darwin's Nightmare [6] —traveling to Tanzania for the filming and to Paris for the editing.[ citation needed ]
Flynn's poems, essays, and nonfiction have been featured in The New Yorker , Paris Review , National Public Radio 's This American Life , and The New York Times Book Review. [7]
Since 2004, Flynn has been a Professor on the Creative Writing faculty at the University of Houston, where he is in residence each Spring, teaching workshops in poetry and interdisciplinary / collaborative art.[ citation needed ]
In 2009, he married his long-time partner, actress Lili Taylor. Flynn and Taylor live in Brooklyn with their daughter, Maeve. [8]
 | This chapter includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations .(May 2023) |
This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020) circles around the lingering effects of his mother having set their house on fire when he was six years old. It is a hybrid of several genres, including memoir, fairy tale, theater, police reports, poetry, essay, speculative fiction, and magic realism. It is the sibling to I Will Destroy You (2019), which Flynn revised by performing each poem with his band Killdeer over the five years of its writing.
Stay: threads, conversations, collaborations (2020) gathers together 30 years of Flynn's writing, alongside his collaborations with artists, including Jack Pierson, Catherine Opie, Kevin Jerome Everson, Sarah Lipstate, Paul Weitz, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Sarah Sentilles, Amy Arbus, Ryan McGinley, Zoe Leonard, Mark Adams, Bill Schuck, Guy Barash, Mel Chin, M. P. Landis, Jared Handelsman, Alix Lambert, Gabriel Martinez, Douglas Padgett, Kahn & Selesnick, Josh Neufeld, David Brody, Daniel Heyman, Mischa Richter, Jim Peters / Kathleen Carr, and Marilyn Minter.
The Reenactments (2013) [9] [10] chronicles Flynn's experience during the making of Being Flynn , a 2012 film based on his acclaimed 2004 memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. His readings on neuroscience and memory, including books by V. S. Ramachandran, David Eagleman, and Antonio Damasio, helped him to comprehend his experience of being on set for the reenactment of his mother's death by Julianne Moore. My Feelings (2015) is the sibling to The Reenactments.
In The Ticking Is the Bomb (2009), his second memoir, Flynn explored U.S. state-sanctioned torture, as well as his decision to have a child. The title was inspired by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, who Flynn has studied with since 1990. It is the sibling to The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (2011), which continued on similar themes.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), [11] [12] a New York Times Bestseller, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, was a finalist for France's Prix Femina, and has been translated into fifteen languages. It documents Flynn's years working at The Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter in Boston. It uses a form of lyric reportage to examine the creation of homelessness in the U.S., as well as his relationship with his father. It includes lyric fragments, short plays, lists, and documents. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is the sibling to his first book of poetry, Some Ether (2000), which won the inaugural PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry in 1999, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
His book Low was published by in 2023. [13]
| Title | Year | First published | Reprinted/collected |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cartoon Physics, part 1 | Josh Neufeld published drawings inspired by the poem in Crossroads magazine, 2001. | ||
| The Day Lou Reed Died | 2013 | [28] | |
Kim Addonizio is an American poet and novelist.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and band leader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
David Wojahn is a contemporary American poet who teaches poetry in the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and in the low residency MFA in Writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been the director of Virginia Commonwealth University's Creative Writing Program.
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published eleven books of poetry, including Casualty Reports, Because What Else Could I Do, Night Unto Night, Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
Ellen Bryant Voigt is an American poet. She served as the Poet Laureate of Vermont.
Marilyn Chin (陈美玲) is a prominent Chinese American poet, writer, activist, and feminist, as well as an editor and Professor of English. She is well-represented in major canonical anthologies and textbooks and her work is taught all over the world. Marilyn Chin's work is a frequent subject of academic research and literary criticism. Marilyn Chin has read her poetry at the Library of Congress.
Major Jackson is an American poet and professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of six collections of poetry: Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems 2002-2022, The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. His prose is published in A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson. He is host of the podcast The Slowdown.
April Bernard is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.
Mary Jo Bang is an American poet.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Eleni Sikelianos is an American experimental poet with a particular interest in scientific idiom. She is Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University.
Maria Saskia Hamilton was an American poet, editor, and professor and university administrator at Barnard College. She published four collections of poetry, with a fifth collection, All Souls, set to be posthumously published in September 2023. Her academic focus was largely on the American poet Robert Lowell; she edited several collections of the writings and personal correspondence of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Elizabeth Bishop. Additionally, she served as the director of literary programs at the Lannan Foundation, as the Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard College, and as an editor at The Paris Review and Literary Imagination.
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is a memoir by playwright and poet Nick Flynn, describing Flynn's reunion with his estranged father, Jonathan, an alcoholic resident of the homeless shelter where Nick was a social worker in the late 1980s. The title refers to Jonathan's description of homeless life in Boston. It was published by W. W. Norton in September 2004.
Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and a professor of English and director of the creative writing at Denison University, She has published three original poetry collections and co-edited a collection of lyric poems.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
