This is the compiled bibliography, including assigned and suggested reading, for my course “My Light Goes Up in Darkness: Diaries, Journals, and ‘Self’-Writing.” I developed the thinking around this class while teaching Intro to Creative Writing (Engl. 2301) to undergraduates at Brooklyn College in the fall of ’22. I first led this class as it is represented below at Abrons Arts Center in spring ’23. I have made some of this reading available on are.na.

• Bashō, Matsuo. 1966. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches. Translated by Nobuyuji Yuasa. New York: Penguin.
• Beattie, Heather. “Where Narratives Meet: Archival Description, Provenance, and Women’s Diaries.” Libraries & the Cultural Record 44, no. 1 (2009): 82-100.
• Burn, Jane. “How Diary/Memoir/Artist/Poet Jane Compares with Social Media Jane: An Experiment in Person/Persona Via Lyric Essay Fragments.” Persona Studies 8, no. 1 (2022): 52-98.
• Cage, John. 2019. Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse). 1st ed. New York: Siglio.
• Ernaux, Annie. 2003. Simple Passion. Translated by Tanya Leslie. New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Ernaux, Annie. 2022. Getting Lost. Translated by Alison L. Strayer. New York: Seven Stories Press.
• Guibert, Hervé. 2015. Cytomegalovirus: A Hospitalization Diary. Translated by Clara Orban. New York: Fordham University Press.
• Hall, Kimberly. “Empire of Self: Life Writing and the Professional Persona of the Lifestyle Blogger.” Persona Studies 8, no. 1 (2022): 38-51.
• Heti, Sheila. “A Diary in Alphabetical Order.” New York Times (New York), January 19, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/03/23/opinion/sheila-heti-alphabetized-diary-abc.html.
• Hooks, Angela. “The Exclusion of Black Women’s Diary Writing.” Maryland Humanities. March 14, 2018. https://www.mdhumanities.org/2018/03/the-exclusion-of-black-womens-diary-writing/.
• Huff, Cynthia. “‘That Profoundly Female, and Feminist Genre’: The Diary as Feminist Practice.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 17, no. 3/4 (1989): 6-14.
• Kadar, Marlen. “Whose Life Is It Anyway?: Out of the Bathtub and into the Narrative.” In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, edited by Marlene Kadar, 152–61. University of Toronto Press, 1992.
• Kafka, Franz. 2022. The Diaries. Translated by Ross Benjamin. 1st ed. New York: Schocken Books.
• Kawakami, Akane. “Annie Ernaux, 1989: Diaries, Photographic Writing and Self-Vivisection.” Nottingham French Studies 53 (2014): 232-246.
• Kohlmann, Benjamin. “Men of Sobriety and Business: Pepys, Privacy, and Public Duty.” The Review of English Studies 61, no. 251 (2010): 553–71.
• Lorde, Audre. 1997. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
• Maunsell, Jerome B. “The Writer’s Diary as Device: The Making of Susan Sontag in Reborn: Early Diaries 1974–1963.” Journal of Modern Literature 35, no. 1 (2011): 1-20.
• Mayer, Bernadette. “Bernadette Mayer’s List of Journal Ideas.” Electronic Poetry Center Digital Library. University of Pennsylvania, https://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette_Experiments.html.
• Mayer, Bernadette. 2023. Memory. New York: Siglio.
• Miner, Earl. “The Traditions and Forms of the Japanese Poetic Diary.” Pacific Coast Philology 3 (1968): 38–48.
• Neuman, Shirley. “Autobiography: From Different Poetics to a Poetics of Differences.” In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, edited by Marlene Kadar, 213–30. University of Toronto Press, 1992.
• Pineau, Elyse Lamm. “A Mirror of her Own: Anais Nin’s Autobiographical Performances.” Text and Performance Quarterly 12 (1992): 97-112.
• Shōnagon, Sei. 1971. The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon. Translated by Ivan Morris. New York: Penguin.
• Sullivan, Lou. 2019. We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan 1961–1991. Edited by Ellis Martin, and Zach Ozma. 1st ed. New York: Nightboat.
• Szymaszek, Stacy. 2015. Journal of Ugly Sights. Albany, New York: Fence.
• Whitten, Jack. 2018. Notes from the Woodshed. New York: Hauser & Wirth.
• Williamson, Janice. “‘I Peel Myself out of My Own Skin’: Reading Don’t: A Woman’s Word.” In Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice, edited by Marlene Kadar, 133–51. University of Toronto Press, 1992.
• Woolf, Virginia. 2005. A Writer’s Diary. Edited by Woolf Leonard. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (a Harvest Book).
• Yáñez-Bouza, Nuria. “‘Have You Ever Written a Diary or a Journal?’ Diurnal Prose and Register Variation.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 116, no. 2 (2015): 449–74.