Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh on The Lyric Essay

This week’s show is about lyricism! Lyricism in memoir is about using juxtaposition, gaps, and echo. It’s writing that advances by association via imagery and connotation, and language that sings. This is an invitation to step into a different way of thinking about your writing, and anyone can implement elements of lyricism. Guest Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh explains why lyric, hybrid, and mixed genre forms are so appealing and inspiring, especially to writers on the margins and how they speak to something more liminal and more fluid. Don’t miss this articulation of what’s appealing about writing This week’s Memoir Milestone is Rebecca N. Thompson’s Held Together: A Shared Memoir of Motherhood, Medicine, and Imperfect Love. Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh (she/they) is a biracial Nisei whose most recent book, unMothered, unTongued (2025), won the 2024 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction in the AWP Award Series. They are also the author of a fiction collection, Reveal Codes (2023), winner of the Moon City Press Short Fiction Award; a chapbook, #stringofbeads (2023), winner of the Diode Chapbook Competition; and five volumes of poetry, most recently tsunami vs. the fukushima 50 (2019), named a “Best Book of 2019” by the New York Public Library and listed as a poetry finalist in the 2020 Lambda Literary Awards. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.