Score one for The Touchstone Anthology!

The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: Work from 1970 to the Present, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone, brings together fifty works of creative nonfiction selected by five hundred writers and writing teachers from across the U.S. These teachers were asked which essays and personal narratives they chose to give their students as examples of the best creative nonfiction work published since 1970. Their choices include work by such luminaries as Jo Ann Beard, Annie Dillard, Robin Hemley, Jamaica Kincaid, Phillip Lopate, David Sedaris, Sue William Silverman, David Foster Wallace, and—most significantly—upstreet Creative Nonfiction Editor Harrison Candelaria Fletcher.

We are delighted, but not surprised. Harrison’s essay, “The Beautiful City of Tirzah,” appears on page 190, and we encourage you to either buy the anthology or check it out of your local library, so you can read his piece and the other wonderful works in whose company it appears.

Harrison, who holds a BA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from the newly renamed Vermont College of Fine Arts, has been awarded the 2005 New Letters Dorothy Churchill Cappon Prize for best essay and a New Letters Readers’ Award. He was an essay finalist for the 2007 National Magazine Award, and has been a finalist for the PEN Center USA, Eugene S. Pulliam, Iowa Review, and Gulf Coast Awards. Harrison’s work has appeared in New Letters, Fourth Genre, Puerto del Sol, Cimarron Review, and upstreet. A native New Mexican, he lives in Denver, CO, with his wife and two children, and has recently completed a memoir, Man in a Box.