Save Error: Writing, Agency, and Playability
in the Academic Institution
by Kanika Agrawal, Christopher Kondrich,
Joe Lennon, and poupeh missaghi
5.5 x 8.5, 180 pgs., $22
ISBN 978-1-962365-06-2
Forthcoming in 2026.
The university writes itself in the US cultural imagination—through aspirational public-facing messages including mission statements, land acknowledgments, and press releases—as a liberatory force against racism, imperialism, and anti-democratic ideologies. Simultaneously, document by tedious document produced by and for various stakeholders, the university cements itself as an institution concerned first and foremost with credentialing, gatekeeping, and re-asserting its own supremacy.
This irony punctuates a time when tensions are high over academia’s role in society. From the right, we hear accusations that universities are indoctrinating students with “wokeness.” From both the left and the right, we read arguments that the university is failing to protect and promote free speech. And from students, teachers, and administrators, there is intense anxiety over the purpose of the university—is it meant, first and foremost, to serve economic interests? Or can it, should it, work toward other ways of creating interest? Implicated in all of these questions is the role of writing in academia, making it more important than ever to analyze and intervene in established writing practices.
The authors met as graduate students in English and Literary Arts, and they have been in conversation for over ten years in, out of, and about the university. In Save Error, they use the lens of creative writing, a field of study and practice with an uneasy relationship to academia, to examine the (mis)uses of writing in institutional contexts. In a series of critical essays and collaborative genre experiments, they consciously attend to what it is like to be a reader and a writer in academia—to be in the thick of its formal plays of desire, defensiveness, empathy, and arrogance. Leaning into the fraught contradictions they find there, they reach for clearer perspectives on how writing may (or may not) help to reimagine the work of the university.
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Kanika Agrawal is an Indian writer of hybrid and multilingual texts. As an (im)migrant and a former scientist-in-training, she works between and across languages, geographies, and disciplines. Kanika has taught academic and creative writing for twenty years, and she currently serves as an editor at Conjunctions, Foglifter, and khōréō. Her own writing appears in Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Black Warrior Review, FOLDER, Notre Dame Review, Texas Review, and various SFF publications. She has been awarded residencies by the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Denver, CO, and can also be found at www.antiquarkic.com.
Christopher Kondrich is the author of Tread Upon, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2026. He is also the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). His poetry and essays appear widely in such venues as AGNI, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. Co-editor of Creature Conserve: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), he is currently a faculty member for Eastern Oregon University’s MFA in Creative and Environmental Writing, and an Associate Editor of 32 Poems.
Joe Lennon has taught academic English and creative writing on four continents over the last 23 years. He now lives in Brno, Czech Republic, where he is an assistant professor and coordinator of the Writing Lab at the Masaryk University Language Centre, and where he runs free public workshops in creative writing. His academic work includes a recent article in the journal Humanizing Language Teaching. His essays and poems have appeared in RS 500, Map Literary, Incessant Pipe, and Gigantic Sequins.
poupeh missaghi is a writer, editor, translator (between English and Persian), and educator. Her books include Sound Museum (2024) and trans(re)lating house one (2020), both with Coffee House Press. Her translations include Boys of Love by Ghazi Rabihavi (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024), In the Streets of Tehran by Nila (Bonnier Books, 2023), and I’ll be Strong for You by Nasim Marashi (Astra House, 2021). She is currently an assistant professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver, and a faculty mentor at the Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.