The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay: Insights and Prompts from Contemporary Writers and Teachers

FEATURING ESSAYS FROM:
Chelsea Biondolillo • KJ Cerankowski • Ching-In Chen • Oliver de la Paz • Danielle Cadena Deulen • Camille T. Dungy • Jeannine Hall Gailey • Rigoberto González • torrin a. greathouse • Kimiko Hahn • Lily Hoàng • Michael Kleber-Diggs • Rowan McCandless • Sarah Minor • Rajiv Mohabir • Vi Khi Nào • Aimee Nezhukumatathil • Natanya Ann Pulley • Diane Seuss • Sun Yung Shin • Brian Turner • Katrina Vandenberg • Julie Marie Wade • chaun webster • The Cyborg Jillian Weise • Marco Wilkinson

The fifth volume in the immensely popular Field Guide series, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay gives readers an extraordinary window into the methods of 26 expert practitioners at the leading edge of this ever-evolving genre.

With original craft essays, exercises, and examples, each contributor offers reflection and instruction on how lyric essays can be constructed and what makes them unique. As experts in the field, they offer their various approaches to creative nonfiction that uses an essay form, but is lyric in function, meaning that it pays special attention to patterning in language and the resonances of sound and imagery. The anthology's expertise spans possible forms (braid, fragment, hermit crab, zuihitsu), lyric techniques (anaphora, fractal repetition, word associations, use of white space), and lyric processes (incorporating research or visual elements, engineering leaps, sustaining a longform lyric essay). Editors Heidi Czerwiec and Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh further illuminate the genre in their introduction, exploring the history of the lyric essay and its vital place in contemporary literature. This Field Guide is an indispensable addition to the bookshelf of any reader, writer, or instructor intrigued by this inventive and expressive genre.

Essayist and poet Heidi Czerwiec is the author of Crafting the Lyric Essay: Strike a Chord (2024), and the lyric essay collection Fluid States (2019), selected by Dinty W. Moore as winner of Pleiades Press' 2018 Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose, as well as several poetry collections, including Conjoining (2017) and Self-Portrait as Bettie Page (2013). She is also the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets (2015), and a senior editor for Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. She lives and teaches in Minneapolis for the University of Minnesota, Normandale Community College, and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei whose most recent book, unMothered, unTongued (2025), won the 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the AWP Award Series. They are also the author of a fiction collection, Reveal Codes (2023), winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award; a chapbook, #stringofbeads (2023), winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition; and five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (2019), named a "Best Book of 2019" by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. Roripaugh received the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award in Poetry/Prose for 2004 and was a 1998 winner of The National Poetry Series. A professor emeritus of English at the University of South Dakota, they live in Atlanta, Georgia, and Laramie, Wyoming, and currently serve as a faculty mentor at the Carlow University and University of Nebraska low-residency MFA programs.