~ Compiled by Jefferson Beavers, communication specialist, Department of English
The College of Arts and Humanities welcomes new faculty Brenna Womer (she/they) to the Department of English. Prof. Womer is the author of the full-length, mixed-genre collections “Unbrained” (FlowerSong Press, 2023) and “honeypot” (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), as well as the chapbooks “cost of living” (Finishing Line Press, 2022) and “Atypical Cells of Undetermined Significance” (C&R Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in the North American Review, the Indiana Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Northern Michigan University, and an M.A. in English from Missouri State University.
What are you most looking forward to, teaching at Fresno State?
Working with the students. Fresno State represents such a diversity of life experiences and perspectives, and I’m so excited to see how that translates to the creative-writing classroom, specifically in creative nonfiction. I can’t wait to start helping students share their stories.
What are your teaching specialties? How did you become involved with those areas?
My specialties are experimental forms and hybrid writing, specifically flash prose and prose poetry, lyric essays, borrowed forms, and magical realism in creative nonfiction. I was lucky enough to work with some incredible creative writing professors during my B.A., M.A., and MFA programs who assigned texts like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Aimee Bender’s Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, T. Fleischmann’s Syzygy, Beauty, and Nicole Walker’s Micrograms, as well as prompts and projects that pushed me to experiment and subvert genre conventions.
How do you hope your background will elevate the English Department’s offerings at Fresno State?
I hope that my experiences writing and teaching hybrid and multi-genre work will translate into class offerings and programming that will intrigue and challenge writers at every level and across genres. I also hope that my experiences as a military kid, a first-generation college student, a mixed and queer person, a gender-nonconforming woman, a mentally ill person, and a survivor—all of which I write about—will resonate with students and help them feel more empowered to claim and craft their own stories.
As a new instructor who will be teaching creative nonfiction writing, what’s your biggest wish for undergraduates as they learn to explore the intersections of truth, memory, and personal narratives?
My biggest wish for undergraduate creative nonfiction writers is for them to internalize that: 1) there is truth in the way they remember things, and 2) their experiences are theirs to own, even when they involve people—relatives, partners, friends—who disagree with how the writer remembers things and would, perhaps, prefer not to be written about at all.
What are you reading right now?
I always re-read the books I assign in my classes each semester, so I just finished Diane Seuss’s Frank: Sonnets and am wrapping up Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder for English 265, the graduate creative nonfiction seminar. I’m also listening to the audiobook of Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
What is a book you think everyone should read, and why?
Javier Zamora’s Solito, which was released in the latter half of 2022, is a stunning memoir about nine-year-old Zamora’s solo journey traveling with coyotes from his home in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, to the United States, where his parents had traveled ahead of him to start saving money and making a new home for their family.
The memoir is written in both English and Spanish and is a masterclass in character development, pacing, and written action. It’s also doing important activist work to render visible and humanize the many thousands of people daily attempting to migrate across the U.S.-Mexico border and the many millions already in the U.S., each with their own migration story.
What’s a fun fact people may not know about you?
I did my first two years of high school in central Alaska, at a small school on Eielson Air Force Base, where the closest town was called North Pole. Everyone mailed their Christmas cards from the North Pole post office, and there’s a shop in town called the Santa Claus House that’s open year-round and has an outdoor pen for reindeer.
What are your fall 2023 office hours?
Tuesdays from 1 to 5 p.m., and by appointment. I can be reached at bwomer@mail.fresnostate.edu.
The College of Arts and Humanities at Fresno State 