How to Write an Essay

Lucy Xiang-fu Wainger’s How to Write an Essay excels in its study of human nature, set to the backdrop of academia. Chosen as the winning fall chapbook from Palette Poetry’s 2025 Micro Chapbook Prize, the poems in How to Write an Essay explore the relationship between reader and writer, the value in collecting memories, and the important act of witnessing through one’s writing. In her work, the idea of private versus public is constantly at play, questioning what the writer has to publicly unveil about her private life in the name of understanding or self-discovery. There is a war between the logical and emotional self, the overthinker and the instinctual writer. Through Wainger’s open curiosity and woven philosophical webs, this collection of poems chases a thesis through the halls of a universally familiar school.