Today I want to talk about the literary canon, the texts that have been judged to be worthwhile and enduring and therefore deserving of special status in our culture. I’m also going to talk about the ...

NMAI copy 39088019860378 from the library of H. Paul and Jane R. Friesema. "In its consideration of American Indian literature as a rich and exciting body of work, The Voice in the Margin invites us ...

At a party in the early morning of Nov. 20, 1960, a man stabbed his wife with a penknife: once in the stomach and once in the back, nearly killing her. When another partygoer attempted to revive her ...

Too often, we forget that fights about what we shouldn’t read are also battles over what we should read. And that every time someone attempts to ban Toni Morrison or Ta-Nehisi Coates, they’re also ...

When you hear “Willa Cather,” you might think, “Oh yeah, I had to look up My Ántonia on SparkNotes in high school.” Or, if you’re a big literary fan, you might recall some of her other monumental and ...

As a writer born in San Antonio, I have always felt myself anointed, or perhaps branded, by the conflicted literary legacies of the Lone Star State. I was never sure whether my origins—as a descendant ...

When Percy Shelley called poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” he was perhaps anticipating the future argument in poetics that pitted those who are interested in the form as primary a ...

The idea that literature contains multitudes is not new. For the greater part of its history, lit(t)eratura referred to any writing formed with letters. Up until the eighteenth century, the only true ...