The Writer's Chronicle

The Writer's Chronicle provides community, information, news, and ideas for writers. The Writer's Chronicle is published by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP), a nonprofit arts organization. Each issue of the Chronicle also features news on the national literary scene, including listings of opportunities for grants, awards, and publication.

Henry James wrote that the essence of his craft as a writer was loneliness—more profound than discipline or genius; and, as it was for James, so solitude remains the home base for many writers. While you pursue a challenging and lonely art, it’s good to take a break with some good company, like those writers found in the Writer’s Chronicle. The Chronicle has published interviews with accomplished writers such as Rita Dove, Andre Dubus III, Lucille Clifton, Mark Doty, Colum McCann, Lee Gutkind, Don Lee, Sherman Alexie, Patricia Hampl, Cynthia Ozick, Ted Kooser, Aleksandar Hemon, and Cornelius Eady among many others. We have also published great essays on the art and craft of writing by Bret Lott, Kazim Ali, Mark Jarman, Charles Baxter, Martin Espada, Alice Mattison, Maxine Kumin, Thomas Mallon, and Dana Gioia.

Our essays will provide you with the best writerly advice. You will read how other writers read the works of their peers for new insights on how to shape poems, stories, memoirs, and novels. Here are just a few examples of topics that we have covered: Cormac McCarthy’s deft use of setting, Eudora Welty’s use of colloquial speech, the role of minor characters in creative nonfiction, what police reports can teach a writer about the voice of storytelling, strategies for the closure of poems, the ethics of appropriating ethnic voices, navigating family sensitivities in memoir writing, and masters and innovators of formalist poetry.