Renee Angle

Renee Angle’s work fuses conceptual writing techniques with life writing (diaries, letters, journals, memoir, genealogy), to create essays, poems, and novels. Her R&D Grant will support the creation of new work, a pair of auto-theoretical essays, which seeks to take a skeptical stance towards the orthodoxy and dogma of gender, how gender is commonly understood and misunderstood, taught, and depicted in the broader culture, as well as the received knowledge that children may inherit automatically through the cis-gendered perspective of parents.

This work is part of a manuscript of essays Angle has been working on over the last four years about her experiences as a parent. Through this work, the writer aims to pull the domestic sphere of motherhood out of a shadow and into the public and engage a broader audience in conversation about the daily obstacles that occupy all of our lives. Angle’s core question of this manuscript is: what kind of responsibility do we have to each other?

Work Sample

“The Neighborhood Watch is an excerpt of a longer braided essay, in which I describe and reflect on my neighborhood, the legacy of Fred Roger’s Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, 2016 current events, and a violent incident that happens to my family and I at our community pool. My children’s questions and observations punctuate and interweave with my own thoughts.”

Excerpt from “The Neighborhood Watch”

Renee Angle is a writer whose current practice fuses conceptual writing techniques with life writing (diaries, journals, memoir, genealogy) practices to create essays, poems, novels. The author of a hybrid collection, WoO (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), her writing has appeared in the literary journals P-Queue, Entropy Magazine, The Rumpus, Western Humanities Review, The Volta, Diagram, in addition to the anthology I’LL DROWN MY BOOK: CONCEPTUAL WRITING BY WOMEN (Les Figues Press, 2012), and in the chapbook Lucy Design in the Papal Flea (dancing girl press, 2010). She holds an MFA from George Mason University and is the recipient of writing fellowships from the Millay Colony for the Arts and MOCA Tucson AiR program. For over a decade, she worked at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, curating programs for both adults and youth.