Author Archives: Robin Rahija

“If they also write poetry on the side, they will be fuller human beings” #MostImportantThing

Frederick Smock’s answer to Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s question: “What is the most important thing you teach your students?” Clip from Accents radio show on 8-Jul-2011. Complete show can be heard here.

Frederick Smock is associate professor of English at Bellarmine University, where he received the 2005 Wyatt Faculty Award. He has published four previous collections of poems with Larkspur Press. He is also the author of Craft-talk: On Writing Poems, and Pax Intrantibus: A Meditation on the Poetry of Thomas Merton. His poems have appeared in The Antioch Review, The Hudson Review, The Louisville Review, The Merton Journal (UK), Poetry East, Trajectory, and other journals.

“Journal writing saved my life” #MostImportantThing

Elizabeth Beck’s answer to Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s question: “What is the most important thing you teach your students?” Clip from Accents radio show on 21-Dec-2012. Complete show can be heard here.

Elizabeth Beck is a writer, artist and teacher who lives with her family on a pond in Lexington, Kentucky. Nominated for the 2013 Pushcart Prize, she is the author of two books of poems: Interiors and insignificant white girl. Elizabeth achieved her B.A. in English Literature with a minor in Fine Arts from the University of Cincinnati and her M.Ed. from Xavier University. She was an award-winning English and Art History teacher for ten years. During her time at Withrow High School, she founded The Tracks Literary Magazine. She is the proud recipient of the 2012 Artist Enrichment Grant through The Kentucky Foundation for Women. November 2011, Elizabeth founded The Teen Howl Poetry Series that serves the youth of Central Kentucky.- from http://www.elizbeck.com/

“Take a button. Burn the suit” #MostImportantThing

Alyssa Knickerbockers’ answer to Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s question: “What is the most important thing you teach your students?” Clip from Accents radio show on 6/28/2013. Complete show can be heard here.

“Alyssa Knickerbocker is a writer and teacher living in a cold beach cottage on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state, where she’s working on a novel set in the area, revising a collection of linked short stories, and ordering firewood by the cord.

Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Five Chapters, American Short Fiction, The Carolina Quarterly, Brooklyn Magazine, and Meridian, among many others, and has been anthologized in The Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. A novella, Your Rightful Home, is published by Nouvella Books, which puts out gorgeous chapbooks by new and emerging writers (check them out here!).

She recently held the Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2012-2013) and the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville (2010-2012) where she developed and directed the 2012 Axton literary festival, ”The Time Machine: Exploring the Past & Future in Fiction & Poetry.”

She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received the David & Jean Milofsky Prize in fiction and a full scholarship to the New York Summer Writer’s Institute.” – http://alyssaknix.com/