Alum Hannah Fries’ (poetry, ’10) first book of poetry, Little Terrarium, is out now from Hedgerow Books / Levellers Press. Of the book, Maurice Manning wrote: “A mind and a mind’s eye for art are evident on every page of this fine book. Beyond the beautiful, however, these poems also register a sharp regard for the natural world, for our hands-on knowledge of it, and for the plain fact that we are alive at a time when the natural world is most threatened. That is a practical predicament, but it is also a moral reality. To face the practical is a matter of will; to embrace the moral, as this book makes clear, is a matter of love. The love on these pages is human and searching—such is the love we need for art and the love we seek for wisdom.

Alum Victoria Mlyniec (fiction, ’09) won the 2016 Able Muse Write Prize for Fiction, judged by Stuart Dybek. Here is what Stuart Dybek has to say about Victoria’s winning story: “Passerthrough” is an artfully constructed story that within a few pages switches point of view, employs flashback in order to counterpoint past and present narratives, and introduces three convincing characters.” “Passerthrough” will be published in the Winter 2016 issue of Able Muse, print edition.

Alum Robert Rorke’s  (fiction, ’10) story “The Christmas Pyramid” was a finalist in the Boulevard Emerging Writers Fiction Contest

Alum Elisabeth Lewis Corley (poetry, ’10) had poems titled “New Eumenides,” “Full Military Honors, “ and “That Moment When You Want the Radio” published in New Haven Review print edition, July 2016

Alum Scott Challener (poetry, ’08) has three poems in the most recent issue (#9) of Lana Turner Journal: “Snowbound,” “Ghosts and Indices,” and “Route.”

A novel excerpt by alum Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09), which won the Tennessee Williams New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Prize in 2014, made the Cobalt Review’s 2016 Earl Weaver Baseball Writing Prize finalist’s list: Cobalt Review 2016 Baseball Issue

A short story by alum Matthew Zanoni Müller (fiction, ’10) appears at Halfway Down the Stairs:

Hank lived in a light blue trailer up a thin dirt drive some distance behind his friend Aaron’s house, who owned the property. Hank paid him a couple hundred bucks in rent to “hide out back there,” as Aaron said. But it wasn’t really hiding to Hank. It was where he felt all right with things. One of the few places. The trailer was surrounded by pines that shed pin-prick drops of sap in a painfully slow drizzle, against which Hank had strung a giant blue tarp like a sail over the roof of his trailer and pickup. Underneath, the light sifting through the canopy gave everything a blue tinge, like being underwater in a swimming pool whose floor was covered in pine needles. A smaller tarp hung like a kite over the outhouse he had built and which, he was happy, Suzanne hadn’t seemed to mind using the first time she had come over, two days before. That was after dinner, and then again later, after sex, when with much laughter, she got into his big boots and clomped out to make use of it, the door of the trailer screaming on its springs and slamming shut behind her. He liked the feeling of her being out there, and knowing she was coming right back in with his “big man boots,” as she had called them.  It was a kind of aloneness he wasn’t used to. Usually there was no one coming back, and the space outside of his trailer seemed filled with a watchful silence that extended all the way to the top of the hill, where he had the vague intimation of being watched by something, a presence in the empty spaces between the trunks of the pines. Something that filled the darkness. A witness to his small life.

Continue reading online…

Alum Peg Alford Pursell (fiction, ’96) is interviewed by AWP for an “In the Spotlight” feature:

When do you find time to write?
I make the time. I’ve learned the hard way that if I’m not writing, I’m not really inhabiting myself, and if I’m not doing that, I’m not fit company! I write every day first thing, around 5:30 a.m. It took me many years to train myself to do that. I’d always been a person who wrote late at night, a habit I developed no doubt because of life circumstances, one that probably many mothers share, or have shared, of waiting until the children’s needs are met and the kids are in bed. When I pursued my MFA at the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, that’s how it went. By day (and night) I worked as a public education teacher and single mother, attending to all the duties therein: making sure that we all ate and had clean clothes to wear, paying the utility bills, overseeing homework, grading papers and preparing lessons, etc. I ran no less than six miles a day! I had to, to burn off the adrenaline. So, beginning around 9:30 to maybe as late as 11:00 p.m., I wrote. And read. And wrote. The MFA Program was rigorous, rightly so. But those late hours, that was my writing time. I’m not the same person or writer as in those days, but it took a lot for me to become accustomed to making the first true activity of the day my time for writing. I didn’t think my mind or brain could ever function that way, and was highly uncomfortable making myself write first thing. Now I’ve been doing this for about five or six years and I can’t imagine anything else. So maybe I’ll have to change that up again sometime soon! The important point is that I know I need to write, and I have suffered immeasurably when I haven’t, and I believe it’s important that I do if I’m to be the best editor and advocate I can be for other writers—which is what I truly want. So I make sure that I write.

Continue reading online…

An excerpt from a poem by alum Annie Kim (poetry, ’09) appears in The Kenyon Review:

Sijo No. 1
at the edge   I sometimes catch   wisps of my   big white childhood

two white dogs   barking madly   two sisters   jumping taut rope

it’s as if   they were neatly glassed   all those years   or I’m glassed out

Continue reading online…