Mixing It Up (Panel): Marianne Boruch, Karen Brennan, Jeremy Gavron, Robin Romm, Alan Shapiro, David Shields (January 2014)

What prompts a poet to write fiction, or poets/fiction writers to undertake a memoir? Is the impulse toward “another genre” purely a formal choice, or is it made necessary by the material to be served? Are valuable lessons brought back to one’s “primary” genre? Or, will some of us spend our writing lives happily alternating among poems, novels, stories, essays, memoir and admixtures that defy taxonomy? Six faculty members report from own their experiences crossing the genre divide.