Chapter One: Original Essays… Fresh Each Month!
Chapter One is your doorway into the creative lives of today’s most compelling poets and prose writers. Each month, our high‑engagement newsletter delivers fresh craft insights, personal stories, and first‑chapter previews—free to read and easy to share. It’s an accessible way to explore new voices, deepen your understanding of the writing process, and find books that resonate.
For more on the origin of the Chapter One Series, read our 2017 Project Proposal.
Essay Series 2026
- JULY: Mark Melnick, “How a Book is Made”
- JUNE: Diamond Forde, “On Tweet’s ‘Southern Hummingbird’, or Black Women and The Politics of Desire”
- MAY: Jane Hirshfield reads “Borges’ Generosity and Some Thoughts on Doubt” (video)
- APRIL: Marjorie Stein, “Because There is No Question and No Answer”
- MARCH: Eileen R. Tabios, “On Writing a Newspaper Poetry Column”
- FEBRUARY: Liz Rose Shulman, “The Green Notebook”
- JANUARY: CM Burroughs, “What It Takes”
Essay Series 2025
- DECEMBER: Poet Laureate of the U.S. Arthur Sze, “Revealing and Reveling in Complexity”
- NOVEMBER: Lisa Fishman, “I Turn the Notebook Upside Down”
- OCTOBER: Liane Strauss, “Listening Allowed”
- SEPTEMBER: Michael McColly, “Lessons for a Tukkikat”
- AUGUST: Denise Low, “Poetry of Letters: A Correspondence with William Stafford”
- JULY: Chris Solís Green, “The Accidental Poet”
- JUNE: Ellen Bass, “Some Thoughts on Juxtaposition in Poetry”
- MAY: R.L. Stine, “Say yes to things you meet. You don’t know where they will lead.”
- APRIL: Amber Flora Thomas, “A Journey Between Poetry & Art”
- MARCH: David St. John, “You Can’t Judge a Book”
- FEBRUARY: Danusha Laméris, “How I Came to Poetry”
- JANUARY: Rusty Morrison, “Writing into risk”
Essay Series 2024
- DECEMBER: Xiaoqiu Qiu, “The Little Dying”
- NOVEMBER: Ilya Kaminsky, “Reading Dante in Ukraine”
- OCTOBER: Forrest Gander, “The Questions We Ask Ourselves: An Interview by Jim Natal”
- SEPTEMBER: Jane Hirshfield, “Borges’s Generosity & Some Thoughts on Doubt”
- AUGUST: Charles A. Matz, “A Poetry Before Oblivion: Five Rules”
- JULY: Barbara Novack, “Why Poetry?”
- JUNE: W.C. Williams to D. Ignatow, “I wrote you an indifferent letter today.”
- MAY: Liane Strauss, “How to Help Your Non-Poet Friends Enjoy Poetry More (Maybe)”
- APRIL: Susan Terris, “It’s All About the Duchess”
- MARCH:
- FEBRUARY: Tony Trigilio, “Is Daily Writing Possible?”
- JANUARY: Spencer Rumsey, “No Spontaneous Bop Prosody! A Professional Editor’s Advice to Poets Writing Prose”
Essay Series 2023
- DECEMBER: Eileen R. Tabios, “The ‘Monobon’: Transforming Intense Emotion into a New Poetry Form”
- NOVEMBER: Laurel Blossom, “I think you’re going to write a lot.”
- OCTOBER: Annalise Nassani, “Beginning with Erasure: Writing That Fills a Void”
- SEPTEMBER: Elaine Equi, “Square One”
- AUGUST: Denise Low, “Gary Snyder and a Lesson in Consistency”
- JULY: Karin Randolph, “Too Many Titles”
- JUNE: Al Filreis, “Notes toward a pedagogy of ModPo”
- MAY: Mary Mackey, “My Own Private Jaguars: Craft and Inspiration”
- APRIL: Eileen R. Tabios, “(see title below)”
- MARCH: Stephen Paul Miller, “The Poetry Mailing List: Poetry Beyond Borders”
- FEBRUARY: Denise Duhamel, “In Praise of Colette Inez’s ‘Pay Yourself First’”
- JANUARY: Sandy McIntosh,“Coaxing the Hangman”
Essay Series 2022
- DECEMBER: Patricia Carlin, “At Home”
- NOVEMBER: David Lehman, “The Birth of The Best”
- OCTOBER: Tony Trigilio, “The Importance of Being Obstinate”
- SEPTEMBER: Mary Mackey, “The World Before Words”
- AUGUST: Steve Fellner, “On Murderers, Anorexia, and the Concept of the Soul”
- JULY: Sandy McIntosh, “A Poet Learns to Drive the Author-Driven Book”
- JUNE: Denise Low, “The Fourth Dimension of Writing”
- MAY: Basil King, “My Aunt Ethel’s husband Dicky Graveny was a sculptor”
- APRIL: Stephanie Strickland, “Do I contradict myself?”
- MARCH: Rafael Jesús González, “The Gasp”
- FEBRUARY: Arthur Sze, (Interview) Revealing and Reveling in Complexity
- JANUARY: Barbara Novack, “Thanking Mr. Cohn”
Essay Series 2021
- Sandy McIntosh: Writing Influences: “Why Should I Write Another Book?”
- Philip F. Clark: “Sustain Wonder”
- Lynne Thompson, Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize Winner Named Los Angeles Poet Laureate
- Gail Newman: “Alphabets of a Lost Tongue”
- Alfred Corn: “Six Pointers”
- Kim Shuck: “Hopscotch and Bank Robbers”
- Sheila Murphy: Sound. Silence. Privacy. Confidence.
- Donald Wellman: Heilbronn or How I Became a Poet
Essay Series 2020
- Geoffrey O’Brien: “WHERE DID POETRY COME FROM: Three Early Encounters”
- Stephanie Strickland: “Late to the Party”
- David B. Axelrod: “The Value of the Local: Red Meat for the Poets On Long Island”
- Julie Marie Wade: “Small Doors”
- Alfred Corn: “A Writer’s Beginnings”
- Susan Howe Applauds Tony Trigilio‘s “Proof Something Happened”
- Tony Trigilio: “Passing Through Our Brief Moment in Time: A Poetics of the Ordinary”
- Dennis Barone: “These Hills, This Mountain-Laurel”
Essay Series 2019
- Burt Kimmelman: “My Tutelage”
- Eileen R. Tabios: “My First Book”
- Sandy McIntosh: “Two Bookstores and Two Capote Intrusions”
- Kim Shuck: “Maybe the Pepperwood Tree Taught Me to Write”
- Lynne Thompson: “Father Tongue”
- Indigo Moor: “A Long Overdue Apology”
- Daniel Morris: “Reading Spivack/Reading Myself”
- David Lehman: “Opening Shot”
- Basil King: The Past is as Present as I Want the Future to Be
- Basil King: Disparate Beasts: Basil King’s Beastiary, Part Two
- Amy Gerstler: Ships In Bottles
- Barbara Novack: “Singing the Melody”