Migrating Craft: The Art and Practice of Contemporary U.S. Writers with Immigrant Roots brings together twenty essays by contemporary U.S. writers on their art and craft. Representing a wide range of cultures, literary traditions, and writing genres, these authors reflect on their creative processes, craft techniques, and relationships to language. They also explore how literary heritage and aesthetic principles from their countries of origin intersect with, or resist, the dominant Western frameworks of craft taught and celebrated in the United States. Rather than treating immigrant experience as peripheral, these essays place it at the center of artistic innovation and practices, showing how multiple heritages enrich and expand contemporary U.S. writing. This anthology offers a window into diverse creative practices and a reimagining of craft itself-craft as something continually shaped by movement, history, and the porous boundaries between cultures and languages.
Khem K. Aryal is the author of the short story collection The In-Betweeners and the fiction chapbook His Grandma Blues. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such journals as The Pinch, Reed, South Carolina Review, New Writing, and Pangyrus. He is also the editor of South to South: Writing South Asia in the American South (TRP 2023) and the series editor for TRP's Creative Writing Studies series. An associate professor of creative writing at Arkansas State University, he is a 2025 recipient of the Catalyze Fellowship from Mid-America Arts Alliance.
"Migrating Craft is an exquisite argument against the primacy of well-worn craft ideas represented in the "Western tradition" and an advocate for the notion that there is a much richer "multiplicity" of craft values available to writers. All twenty of the essays in the anthology describe a move toward what I have come to call "literary globalism," an aesthetic concept that makes a wide range of craft techniques available to any writer, regardless of the traditions that national identity would suggest. This is a beautiful, necessary book and an engaging reading experience for both writers and teachers of creative writing." -Jeffrey Condran, author of Prague Summer "This anthology is a stunner. A thrilling, comprehensive work that examines "third spaces" for those with immigrant roots. Deftly researched and written, these essays examine tradition, colonialism, stigma, humor in immigrant communities, "genre-mashing" and the hybridization of language, among many other topics. I haven't read a volume in recent memory that is so fiercely scholarly and also wonderfully relevant, insistent and creatively expansive. This book certainly knows how to "translate a wound" in refreshing new ways. A must-read." -Jennifer Maritza McCauley, author of When Trying to Return Home "Who are the rules of writing for, and what do they cost us? Across genres and traditions, the writers in this lively and intelligent collection reflect on the pressure to master inherited forms-often coded as neutral, universal, or "good writing"-and on what is gained, distorted, or lost in that process. What emerges is not a rejection of craft, but a rethinking of it: an insistence that stories, like houses, do not take the same shape everywhere; that language carries different capacities for feeling and boundary-crossing; and that writing in received forms need not mean submission to their historical power. Taken together, these essays model a practice attentive to form, ethics, and pleasure-one that resists cultural voyeurism while remaining grounded in the textures of lived life and the promise that migration may well be the key to making the world anew." -Marie Mockett, author of The Tree Doctor "Migrating Craft isn't just about how authors of immigrant roots write but also how we, as Americans and in the West, read. It questions our assumptions about storytelling and opens the aperture on the different ways people from around the world consume stories. At its core, this important anthology is about communication, and how we make our experiences-no matter how distinct and distant-legible to each other. I greatly enjoyed these essays and think you will too." -Leland Cheuk, author of No Good Very Bad Asian
