Writer to Writer – Featured Guest

May’s Writer to Writer show features Ken Rodgers and Rebecca Evans in conversation with poet, essayist, and educator Aaron Shurin.

I felt this huge sense of “mission,” of purpose talking with Aaron as he shared his 40+ year quest pioneering the resurgence of the prose poem as a critical contemporary art form. Aaron’s work, on the page and in the classroom, continues to challenge questions of gender and sexuality, lyricism and narrative, poetry and prose.

He’s been a central member of the San Francisco Bay Area writing community for half a century.

A graduate himself of the storied Poetics Program at the New College of California, he is a professor emeritus and former director of the MFA Writing program at the University of San Francisco. His work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation, among others.

He’s authored numerous books, including the poetry collections Elixir: New and Selected Poems (2025), The Blue Absolute (2020), Citizen (2011), Involuntary Lyrics (2005), The Paradise of Forms: Selected Poems (1999), a Publishers Weekly Best Book, and A’s Dream (1989). He has also published numerous essay collections, including, The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (2016), King of Shadows (2008), and Unbound: A Book of AIDS (1997).

If you missed the show (Writer to Writer on Stray Theater) Radio Boise, no worries, you can still have a listen.