I’M HANNAH HUFF – A POET, ESSAYIST, AND LITERARY MAVEN
DOWN MEMORY LANE
Learning how to live poetically requires an education — not just in classrooms, but through consistent exposure to high-quality texts. In fact, most K-12 classes don’t fulfill this need at all: for many teachers, literature is an obligation, not a necessity. Luckily, my mum has superb aesthetic taste, and at home she always encouraged me to seek out books with robust imagery, a pound of philosophical inquiry, and a dash of poetry no matter the genre. In the public library where she worked, I skipped (figuratively and literally) right past the YA section, and started poring over Langston Hughes, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf,* and others. These authors filled me with hues and moods, and motivated me to notice the lyricism in my local landscapes, such as a rusty moon through a blue oak out the window on the stairs to my bedroom.
ACADEMIC SOPHISTICATION
I continued my intimate interactions with texts as an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a BA in English, summa cum laude, and with College Honors. I then entered the MFA Creative Writing: Poetry program at Cal State University, Long Beach, which I also graduated from summa cum laude. I emphasize my educational kudos not to be highfalutin’, but because achieving them hinged on an aptitude for written analysis of literature — and that’s precisely what the Notes of Oak literary blog is concerned with. During the MFA program, I also honed my own creative writing methods, and have produced a prose-poetry hybrid manuscript, a poetry manuscript, and a lyric-essay manuscript, all of which your presence on this very website will help get published as I build my authorial brand.
THE PRESENT LITERARY MAVEN
Reading good literature is a way of living because quality content is a lens through which we learn to reconceptualize the quotidian: the dead moth becomes a portal to the moon; the road becomes a crossroads for the survival of mountain lions; the emptiness over yonder becomes a route for a man to understand what it means to lose his mother. To this end, I’ve refined my literary palate over 2.5 decades, and I’m pleased to bring to you the “how-to” behind the best writing I can find — in terms of how to recognize it, how to better enjoy the reading process, and how to extrapolate poetic ideas into your everyday existence.
PUBLICATIONS
Poetry
- Portland Review Vol. 66, 2020 – “I’m Thinking About My Molars Again, Hidden Laborer”
- Rumble Fish Quarterly Winter 2020 – “Suicide as Survival Instinct”
- The Coil DaguerreoTyped #20: Ekphrastic Response – “A Routine Groundbreaking”
- RipRap No. 39, 2017 – “Incisors, Solid Deciduous Antlers”
- RipRap No. 36, 2014 – “Sugar Cane” and “I15”
Creative Nonfiction
- Winner – The Nasiona Flash Creative Nonfiction Prize, 2019 – “Finding Jean Palmer”
- Finalist – Terrain.org 9th Annual Contest in Nonfiction — “Tacit Cartography”
Photography
LITERARY ACHIEVEMENTS
- Finalist – 2019 Princemere Poetry Prize (January 2020)
- Top 10 – New York Encounter 2020 “Crossing the Divide” Poetry Contest (January 2020)
- Shortlist – The A3 Review’s July Poetry Contest (July 2019)
- Longlist – 2019 Disquiet Literary Contest (March 2019)
- Semi-Finalist – Tupelo Press 2017 Dorset Prize (April 2019)
READ MY OTHER WORK
*Be prepared for constant references to Virginia Woolf. The title of this blog probably should have been, “A Love Letter to Virginia Woolf for Producing the Most Brilliant Writing, Although Most People Don’t Seem to Recognize This Or Even Read Good Writing at All, Sincerely, Hannah Huff –Literary Maven.”