New Faculty Spotlight: By the Book with Alyse Knorr

Editor's note: Alyse Knorr recently joined Lighthouse to teach poetry and nonfiction (welcome, Alyse!). Keep an eye out for her upcoming classes. In the meantime, she generously put together a list of some of her more recent, memorable reads below. 

Things that fire me up right now: 

  • Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson - This is one of my favorite books of poetry ever–it's a novel in verse that rewrites the Hercules/Geryon myth into a queer love story. It's the first book I ever read that transcended genre boundaries in a meaningful way, and it set the course for my writing career ever since. 
  • In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado - I can't remember the last time I felt this excited or devastated by a book. This stunning experimental memoir is about domestic violence within a lesbian partnership, and it's absolutely riveting. 
  • Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks - This book sums up my approach to teaching: that it's a sacred endeavor, and that the mission is "not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.”
  • X-Men - I'm re-watching the original X-Men movies right now in order to teach them in my Superheroes class at Regis University, and they're so great! Brilliant allegories for civil rights, immigration rights, disability rights, and LGBTQIA rights. 
  • A Humument - I recently purchased the final edition of this incredible altered book project, and it's gorgeous. The artist, Tom Phillips, found a trashy Victorian novel at a secondhand store and then spent 50 years erasing each page into a new poem-art piece. There's really nothing quite like it!