52 Writing Prompts: Inspiration for the Creative Writer - Paperback

by Suzanne Roberts (Author)

A 2026 Editor's Choice by NewPages

Drawing from more than thirty years of creative writing teaching experience, Suzanne Roberts offers down-to-earth, witty, and wise straight talk about writing and the writing life, accessible craft discussions, and thought-provoking twenty-minute genre-crossing writing prompts. This multi-genre approach is arranged by theme, including memory, family and friends, writing the body, love and lust, death and grief, nature and the environment, stories of shame, and magic and myth, along with discussions of revision and editing, building writing community, and publishing. The chapters offer a short discussion of each theme, friendly pep talks, accessible craft tips, a selection of thirty-five poems, stories, and essays from a diverse array of contemporary writers, and, of course, the writing prompts.

Featured authors include Camille T. Dungy, Carolyn Forché, Gina Frangello, Linda LeGarde Grover, Lisa Lee Herrick, Major Jackson, Rebecca Makkai, Eva Saulitis, Patricia Smith, Stacey Waite, Lidia Yuknavitch, among many others, with writing advice of their own. 52 Writing Prompts will encourage and motivate both aspiring and established writers.

Author Biography

Suzanne Roberts is the author of Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties (Nebraska, 2022), longlisted for the 2023 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Nebraska, 2020); and Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail (Bison Books, 2012), winner of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Award; as well as four collections of poetry. Visit her website at www.suzanneroberts.net.