Farewell, “Casa Azul Cripple,” and Other Voices Querétaro 2015
Today marks my last day as the editor of the Sunday Rumpus, and I’m honored to celebrate it by publishing one of my favorite writers working today, Emily Rapp, with a stunningly powerful and complex essay, “Casa Azul Cripple.” I was thrilled to first introduce Emily’s work to The Rumpus three years ago, and this, one of her finest essays, could not be a better swan song for my treasured time here, and for what I think The Rumpus offers to the literary community in terms of digging in deep, defying easy taglines, continuing to embrace long-form personal and political and cultural essays that go places it is simply impossible to reach in 650 words. “Casa Azul” is one to bookmark, to savor, to return to for pleasure or to teach, to digest slowly over morning coffee and evening wine … I hope you will find yourself as shaken and transformed and exhilarated by it as I am.
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For fans of Rapp’s, as well as other Sunday Rumpus regulars like Jennifer Pastiloff and Rob Roberge, I am thrilled to also announce the schedule, faculty and line-up for Other Voices Querétaro 2015 and the unveiling of our updated website. There are only 24 spots this year for the May 15-25 program, so please contact [email protected] if you’re interested in joining us in Mexico!
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Finally, an official welcome to Martha Bayne and Zoe Zolbrod, who will commence their Sunday editorship next week. And thank you all for three amazing years!
Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction and a forthcoming memoir, Blow Your House Down. Her novel A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014) is currently under development by Netflix as a series produced by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint 2016) was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, including UIC, Northwestern’s School of Continuing Studies, UCLA Extension, the University of California Riverside Palm Desert, Roosevelt University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago.
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