The University of Iowa

Cecile Goding

Cecile Goding is from a small county in South Carolina, where she coordinated adult literacy efforts before moving to Iowa City. She is also from New England, Saudi Arabia, and the Silicon Valley. For her poems, she has won the Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo prizes, a fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Poets, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in anthologies, journals, newspapers, and on small screens. Recent projects involve a memoir, a collaboration with an Arabic writer on a fiction collection, and a sci-fi opera.

Instructor Events

The Well-Tempered Paragraph: Memoirs in Miniature

Weekend June 20 to June 21 2020
Instructor(s): 
Cecile Goding

How much of a life can be squeezed into a paragraph? This will be the challenge during our weekend retreat, as we tackle this most common unit of composition. Reading and appreciating these small blocks of type, none of them common, will be our first task. Our focus will be on those sparked by a memory. We will read from After the Fact, by poets Marvin Bell and Chris Merrill.  We will read from Margaret Renkl's Late Migrations.

The Poetry of Prose

Weekend July 18 to July 19 2020
Instructor(s): 
Cecile Goding

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor. My hate is like ripe fruit. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. If you’re like me, you return again and again to those passages from poetry and prose you can’t forget. Like me, you might be wondering, “What exactly makes those words so memorable, and how can my own writing be more like that?”