Tania Runyan

Cutest girls in the world? Go to California... ...or so The Beach Boys once told us. Whether it's the girls, the golden sun, the freedom, or brushing with celebrity near the sea, California embodies many of the ways we've dreamed to the end of the American continent. But what if you were one of those California girls-and not just someone's storied dream? What if California was only the place you grew up, and you found yourself dreaming inward, towards the heartland and a haven where you'd be free to make peace with your anxious past? Tania Runyan was that girl. Is that woman. Through her eyes in this novella-length memoir, we get an inside view of 1980s suburban California-and see the struggle to come to terms with a dream that always felt like it wasn't hers. *Book club discussion questions included *

Looking for a poetry handbook to spark your imagination and guide you in the pleasures of writing poetry with heart and soul?Explore this inspiring "workshop in a book." No matter your level, you can make poems that express more deeply and impact more richly. Poems to keep. Poems to share.From the author of How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem, comes a truly delightful book on how to write poetry in form. Tania Runyan's previous How to Write a Poem focused on free verse. It covered the powerful techniques of poetry writing: image, sound, line breaks, surprising insights, risk-taking, revision strategies. It also provided practical resources to get your poems published. This companion book builds on How to Write a Poem, revealing the world of classic and new poetry forms, to help you grow and explore more.How to Write a Form Poem is a helpful guide for poetry beginners. It's an inspiring reference (and a fun read) for experienced poets of all levels. It's also a useful tool for teachers who want an accessible, informative, imaginative text for students-with plenty of tips for how to actually approach writing the forms, lots of sample poems to illustrate the forms + intriguing poetry prompts How to Write a Form Poem covers 10 fabulous forms-sonnets, sestinas, haiku, villanelles, pantoums, ghazals, rondeaux, odes, acrostics (the real kind), found poems + surprising variations on classic forms (triolet, anyone?), to challenge you when you're ready to go the extra mile.You'll also be entertained by Runyan's own travel stories that she uses to explain and explore the various forms-the effect of which is to bring form poetry down to earth (and onto your own poetry writing map). Carnival, lighthouse, monument, state park...she uses them all to help explain the exciting world of how to write poems in form. Her travels also result in a collection of satisfying sample poems she shares with readers.Other sample poems include works from both popular and emerging poets from many walks of life and geographies. In your anthology travels here, you'll meet (or get reacquainted with) Conor O'Callaghan, Richard Pierce, Ashley M. Jones, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Claude McKay, Tom Hunley, Elizabeth Bishop, Celia Lisset Alvarez, Elise Paschen, Frank O'Hara, Victoria Chang, Joshua Gage, Katie Manning, Seth Haines, Natasha Trethewey, David K. Wheeler, Chip Livingston, John McCrae, Rick Maxson, Robert Bridges, Albert Giraud, Charles Henry Luders, Janet Aalfs, Rebecca Lauren, Marci Rae Johnson, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Matsuo Basho, Matsuo Allard, Amy Lowell, Charles B. Dickson, Christopher Patchel, Michelle Ortega, Ezra Pound, Sandra Heska King, Todd C. Truffin, Erin Keane, John Poch, L.L. Barkat, Susan Rothbard, Gabriel Spera, David Wright, Isaac Willis, Jeanne Murray Walker, Benjamin Myers, Murray Silverstein, Monica Sharman, Barbara Crooker, deb y felio, Faisal Mohyuddin, Edgar Allan Poe, Aaron Brown, Zeina Hashem Beck, Dheepa Maturi, John Drury, Marjorie Maddox, Jill Baumgaertner, Maureen E. Doallas, Juditha Dowd, Thomas Gray, Ron Wallace, Lucille Clifton, Alexander Pope, Clint Smith, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Barbara Howes, Sara Barkat, Megan Willome, Allison Joseph, Claire Batemen, Glynn Young, John Stevenson, Jim Kacian, Carolyn Hall, Roberta Beary, Lorin Ford, Clement Hoyt, and Wallace Stevens. Whew How to Write a Form Poem is a little adventure waiting for you.*** Learn about the poets' processes and poem backstories when you visit https: //www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/category/poet-a-day/ - You can also hear recordings of many of the poets reading their poems

What Will Soon Take Place is an imaginative journey through the book of Revelation. It offers a poet’s view of the prophetic, not in the sense of seeking out clues to the “end times,” but a means of taking this strange, fantastic book of scripture and letting it read its way into personal lives. This is not prophecy as foretelling, but forth-telling: telling us the truths of our lives in the light of God’s light. But rather than escape into some safe, heavenly realm, the poems return to our homes and meet us in the form of our neighbors, persecuted believers, and in shopping malls with vivid, edged-up language and the authority to believe and doubt at once.

With consummate skill, subtle and exacting artistry, and fierce passion, Tania Runyan's first collection, Simple Weight, brilliantly unveils the mysterious ties tethering heaven to earth and] explores the painful and troubling journeys of a soul in search of the divine.... Hers is a voice brimming with a palpable humanity and beautiful pathos--complex, wise, mutable, and wholly original.--Maurya Simon, author of The Raindrop's Gospel__________Spiritual without being in the least bit preachy, Runyan deals in matters of the heart, letting us experience the ineffable through a variety of subjects, often commonplace objects: a dead goldfish, a broken dishwasher, dust mites.... Runyan uses deeply infused language throughout: "I chew the name God, God like habitual / gum." God, "the holy / singularity." "God who buries // his miracles in the soil." These] poems have weight--emotional, spiritual, political--but are anything but simple.--Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More__________Tania Runyan claims she does not concern herself with things too marvelous for her. Well, she's lying. Simple Weight ponders and illuminates cicadas emerging from the earth and martyrs merging their bones with dust. In Runyan's world--which is our world--the human intrudes upon the holy, making it more holy still. These poems, like the Psalms themselves, will fall through the years "like a muscle of water." Drink deeply. --Paul Willis, author of Rosing From the Dead: Poems