External links/references
- Roderick Townley's Official Webpage
- Simon & Schuster: Roderick Townley
- Kansas Poets: Roderick Townley
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
Roderick Townley | |
|---|---|
| Born | June 7, 1942 |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Genre | Young adult fiction, Poetry, Literary criticism, Adult fiction |
| Website | |
| www | |
Roderick Townley (born June 7, 1942) is an American author of juvenile, young adult, and adult books, including books of poetry, nonfiction, and literary criticism. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and was for many years a poet and fiction writer, and for a time lived in New York City and wrote for TV Guide, The Village Voice and other publications. In 2001, he began the Sylvie Cycle, a metafictional series about the spunky, fictional Princess Sylvie who lives her life in a book.
Roderick Townley has published over a dozen books, comprising poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism. The Sylvie Cycle, his trilogy of middle grade novels, has been widely praised and appears in several foreign editions, as well as in large print and audio versions. He has also written two young adult novels, Sky (Atheneum, 2004), and The Red Thread: A Novel in Three Incarnations (Atheneum, 2007).
Mr. Townley taught in Chile on a Fulbright scholarship, worked in New York City as an editor, and now writes from his home in Kansas. Along the way, he has won a number of honors, including the Peregrine Prize for Short Fiction, the Thorpe Menn Award, the Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship in Fiction, the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award, and First Prize in two contests sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. His novel, The Great Good Thing (the first volume in The Sylvie Cycle), was a Top Ten Book Sense Pick and has been optioned for film.
Townley continues to write poetry, publishing his work in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The North American Review, and other journals.
Mr. Townley has two children, Jesse and Grace, and is married to poet and yoga instructor Wyatt Townley.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
Canadian literature is the literature of a multicultural country, written in languages including Canadian English, Canadian French, Indigenous languages, and many others such as Canadian Gaelic. Influences on Canadian writers are broad both geographically and historically, representing Canada's diversity in culture and region.
Thomas Michael Disch was an American science fiction author and poet. He won the Hugo Award for Best Related Book – previously called "Best Non-Fiction Book" – in 1999, and he had two other Hugo nominations and nine Nebula Award nominations to his credit, plus one win of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, a Rhysling Award, and two Seiun Awards, among others.
Robert Hilles is a Canadian poet and novelist.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain based on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.
Steven Heighton was a Canadian fiction writer, poet, and singer-songwriter. He is the author of eighteen books, including three short story collections, four novels, and seven poetry collections. His last work was Selected Poems 1983-2020 and an album, The Devil's Share.
Christian Karlson "Karl" Stead is a New Zealand writer whose works include novels, poetry, short stories, and literary criticism. He is one of New Zealand's most well-known and internationally celebrated writers.
William "Bill" Wall is an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer.
Carole Boston Weatherford is an African-American author and critic, now living in North Carolina, United States. She is the winner of the 2022 Coretta Scott King Award for Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre. She writes children's literature and some historical books, as well as poetry and commentaries. Weatherford is best known for her books Juneteenth Jamboree, Freedom in Congo Square, and You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen. Notably, Weatherford has written literary criticisms of racist representations in children's entertainment. Today, she often writes with her son, Jeffery Boston Weatherford, who is an illustrator and poet.
Dan Schneider is an American poet and critic of literature and film who runs the criticism and literary website Cosmoetica.
Helon Habila Ngalabak is a Nigerian novelist and poet, whose writing has won many prizes, including the Caine Prize in 2001. He worked as a lecturer and journalist in Nigeria before moving in 2002 to England, where he was a Chevening Scholar at the University of East Anglia, and now teaches creative writing at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
Michael Simms is an American poet, novelist and literary publisher. His novel Bicycles of the Gods: A Divine Comedy was published by Madville Publishing and his most recent poetry collections are American Ash (2020) and Nightjar (2021), both published by Ragged Sky Press. His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including Scientific American, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Mid-American Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Southwest Review, and West Branch. His poems have also appeared in Poem-a-Day published by the Academy of American Poets and been read by Garrison Keillor on the nationally syndicated radio show The Writer's Almanac.
Jeanne Larsen is a poet, novelist, translator, and essayist. Much of her work shows the growing influence of Buddhist perspectives on U.S. literature. This includes not only the poetry and creative nonfiction, but also the novels in her Avalokiteśvara trilogy: Silk Road, Bronze Mirror, and Manchu Palaces.
Philip Graham is an American author, professor, and editor. He is one of the founders, and the current editor-at-large, of the literary/arts journal, Ninth Letter, which won the MLA’s Best New Literary Journal Award in 2005. He is a professor emeritus in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received three campus-wide teaching awards. He has also taught in the low-residency MFA program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Additionally, he is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Illinois Arts Council grants, and the William Peden Prize in Fiction from The Missouri Review, as well as fellowship residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo artists' colony.
The AML Awards are given annually by the Association for Mormon Letters (AML) to the best work "by, for, and about Mormons." They are juried awards, chosen by a panel of judges. Citations for many of the awards can be found on the AML website.
Sarabande Books is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1994. It is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with an office in New York City. Sarabande publishes contemporary poetry and nonfiction. Sarabande is a literary press whose books have earned reviews in the New York Times.
Luis Alberto Urrea is a Mexican American poet, novelist, and essayist.
The Debut Prize is an award for young authors of literary works in the Russian language.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Patricia Traxler, winner of the 2019 Kansas Book Award in Poetry, is an American poet, essayist, and fiction writer who lives in Salina, Kansas. She is the author of four volumes of poetry, a novel, and a short story collection. Born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class family, Traxler was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler’s childhood.
