With consummate skill, subtle and exacting artistry, and fierce passion, Tania Runyan's first collection, Simple Weight, brilliantly unveils the mysterious ties tethering heaven to earth [and] explores the painful and troubling journeys of a soul in search of the divine.... Hers is a voice brimming with a palpable humanity and beautiful pathos--complex, wise, mutable, and wholly original. --Maurya Simon, author of The Raindrop's Gospel __________ Spiritual without being in the least bit preachy, Runyan deals in matters of the heart, letting us experience the ineffable through a variety of subjects, often commonplace objects: a dead goldfish, a broken dishwasher, dust mites.... Runyan uses deeply infused language throughout: "I chew the name God, God like habitual / gum." God, "the holy / singularity." "God who buries // his miracles in the soil." [These] poems have weight--emotional, spiritual, political--but are anything but simple. --Barbara Crooker, author of Radiance, Line Dance, and More __________ Tania Runyan claims she does not concern herself with things too marvelous for her. Well, she's lying. Simple Weight ponders and illuminates cicadas emerging from the earth and martyrs merging their bones with dust. In Runyan's world--which is our world--the human intrudes upon the holy, making it more holy still. These poems, like the Psalms themselves, will fall through the years "like a muscle of water." Drink deeply.  --Paul Willis, author of Rosing From the Dead: Poems

Simple Weight

Literature & Fiction

Runyan, Tania

Poetry

FutureCycle Press

How to read a poem. A lot of books want to teach you just that. How is this one different? Think of it less as an instructional book and more as an invitation. For the reader new to poetry, this guide will open your senses to the combined craft and magic known as "poems". For the well versed, if you will, this book might make you fall in love again. How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem "Introduction to Poetry")—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology included.

How to Read a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem "Introduction to Poetry": (Field Guide Series)

History & Criticism

T.S. Poetry Press

Taking up the personas of Eve, Sarah, Dinah, Mary, Martha and five other women from the Bible, Tania Runyan offers a stunning collection of poems in which the ancient and modern worlds collide. A Thousand Vessels reveals the common and complex experiences of women across the ages--loneliness, friendship, fear, hope, violence, love, bitterness, consolation. Fellow poet Jeanne Murray Walker says, "The two [worlds] are so wonderfully imagined and entwined that I found myself turning the pages of A Thousand Vessels as compulsively as if it were fiction."

A Thousand Vessels: Poems

WordFarm

What Will Soon Take Place is an imaginative journey through the book of Revelation. It offers a poet’s view of the prophetic, not in the sense of seeking out clues to the “end times,” but a means of taking this strange, fantastic book of scripture and letting it read its way into personal lives. This is not prophecy as foretelling, but forth-telling: telling us the truths of our lives in the light of God’s light. But rather than escape into some safe, heavenly realm, the poems return to our homes and meet us in the form of our neighbors, persecuted believers, and in shopping malls with vivid, edged-up language and the authority to believe and doubt at once.

What Will Soon Take Place: Poems (Paraclete Poetry)

Paraclete Press

In Second Sky, Runyan intertwines the life and writings of the Apostle Paul with the spiritual journey of a modern suburban woman confronting the broken world. Second Sky wrestles with the deeply personal challenges presented in Paul's letters and experiences: putting on the new self, burying oneself with Christ, and counting all as loss while driving through snowstorms, reading horrific headlines, and bathing the family dog. These are not simple poems of religious inspiration; they are steely encounters with the living God. Runyan invites us to work out our salvation in rusted Cadillacs, operating rooms, and packs of wild coyotes. Meanwhile, Paul runs from the collapsing walls of his prison cell toward shipwrecks and vipers, meeting us on our own roads to Damascus, the earth breaking open to a second sky of faith.

Second Sky: Poems (Poiema Poetry)

Cascade Books

Is it possible to teach someone how to write a poem? Or does poetry simply “come from the heart” or from a special talent only some can ever hope to have? Of course there’s no formula for writing an amazing poem. If poems came with instructions like IKEA® coffee tables, we'd all be missing the point. But this book will give you some strategies—some tools, if you will—to assemble your personal, imaginative raw materials into poems that will surprise and intrigue. These strategies are focused primarily on free verse, yet many of the concepts can also be applied to form poetry, at both the inception and revision stages. How to Write a Poem uses images like the buzz, the switch, the wave—from the Billy Collins poem “Introduction to Poetry”—to guide writers into new ways of writing poems. Excellent teaching tool. Anthology and prompts included.

How to Write a Poem: Based on the Billy Collins Poem "Introduction to Poetry"

Reference

Writing, Research & Publishing Guides

For over 15 years, Tania Runyan has guided thousands of students in understanding, exploring, and crafting the college application essay—with winning results.   This guide explains what the college application essay is all about: why a student has to write it, the nature of this special writing project, when and how a student should start, and what can be learned about writing itself through this milestone process.  Providing everything a student needs to go from draft to polished essay, the instruction is straightforward, easy to apply, and inspiring.   Woven throughout this engaging guide are illuminating quotes from admissions counselors who want to read just the kind of essays this book can help a student write.   Includes sample essays from students who got into the colleges of their dreams. Also features helpful samples for special situations like transfers. Invaluable resource!

How to Write a College Application Essay: Expert Advice to Help You Get Into the College of Your Dreams (Field Guide Series)

Words, Language & Grammar

From the author of How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem, comes a truly delightful book on how to write poetry in form. Tania Runyan's previous How to Write a Poem focused on free verse; the powerful techniques of poetry writing (image, sound, line breaks, surprising insights, risk-taking, revision strategies); and getting your poems published. This companion book opens up the world of classic poetry forms and new poetry forms, to help poets grow and explore.How to Write a Form Poem is an instructive book for form-poetry beginners. It's an inspiring, useful reference (and a fun read) for experienced poets of all levels. It's also a helpful tool for teachers who want an accessible, informative, inspiring text for students-with plenty of tips for how to actually approach writing the forms, lots of sample poems to illustrate the forms + intriguing poetry prompts!With How to Write a Form Poem by your side, you'll be instructed and inspired with 10 fabulous forms-sonnets, sestinas, haiku, villanelles, pantoums, ghazals, rondeaux, odes, acrostics (the real kind), found poems + surprising variations on classic forms (triolet, anyone?), to challenge you when you're ready to go the extra mile.You'll also be entertained by Runyan's own travel stories that she uses to explain and explore the various forms-the effect of which is to bring form poetry down to earth (and onto your own poetry writing map). Carnival, lighthouse, monument, state park...she uses them all to help explain the exciting world of how to write poems in form. Her travels also result in a collection of satisfying form poems, some of which you'll find featured in the book as samples.Other sample poems include works from both popular and emerging poets from many walks of life and geographies. In your anthology travels here, you'll meet (or get reacquainted with) Conor O'Callaghan, Richard Pierce, Ashley M. Jones, William Shakespeare, John Keats, Claude McKay, Tom Hunley, Elizabeth Bishop, Celia Lisset Alvarez, Elise Paschen, Frank O'Hara, Victoria Chang, Joshua Gage, Katie Manning, Seth Haines, Natasha Trethewey, David K. Wheeler, Chip Livingston, John McCrae, Rick Maxson, Robert Bridges, Albert Giraud, Charles Henry Luders, Janet Aalfs, Rebecca Lauren, Marci Rae Johnson, Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, Matsuo Basho, Matsuo Allard, Amy Lowell, Charles B. Dickson, Christopher Patchel, Michelle Ortega, Ezra Pound, Sandra Heska King, Todd C. Truffin, Erin Keane, John Poch, L.L. Barkat, Susan Rothbard, Gabriel Spera, David Wright, Isaac Willis, Jeanne Murray Walker, Benjamin Myers, Murray Silverstein, Monica Sharman, Barbara Crooker, deb y felio, Faisal Mohyuddin, Edgar Allan Poe, Aaron Brown, Zeina Hashem Beck, Dheepa Maturi, John Drury, Marjorie Maddox, Jill Baumgaertner, Maureen E. Doallas, Juditha Dowd, Thomas Gray, Ron Wallace, Lucille Clifton, Alexander Pope, Clint Smith, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Barbara Howes, Sara Barkat, Megan Willome, Allison Joseph, Claire Batemen, Glynn Young, John Stevenson, Jim Kacian, Carolyn Hall, Roberta Beary, Lorin Ford, Clement Hoyt, and Wallace Stevens. Whew!Whether you're at home or on-the-go, How to Write a Form Poem is a helpful and inspiring guide to writing poetry. We can't wait to see where you take it-and where it takes you!

How to Write a Form Poem: A Guided Tour of 10 Fabulous Forms: includes anthology & prompts! sonnets, sestinas, haiku, villanelles, pantoums, ghazals, rondeaux, odes & more + variations

Cutest girls in the world? Go to California...\n...or so The Beach Boys once told us.\nWhether it’s the girls, the golden sun, the freedom, or brushing with celebrity near the sea, California embodies many of the ways we’ve dreamed to the end of the American continent.\nBut what if you were one of those California girls—and not just someone’s storied dream? What if California was only the place you grew up, and you found yourself dreaming inward, towards the heartland and a haven where you’d be free to make peace with your anxious past?\nTania Runyan was that girl. Is that woman. Through her eyes in this novella-length memoir, we get an inside view of 1980s suburban California—and see the struggle to come to terms with a dream that always felt like it wasn’t hers.\n*Book club discussion questions included!*

Making Peace With Paradise: an autobiography of a California girl

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

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Books by Runyan, Tania