An interview with alum  (fiction, ’08) about her debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, appears at The Guardian:

Krys Lee’s debut novel, How I Became a North Korean, opens with a description of a lavish banquet hosted in Pyongyang by the dictatorial “Dear Leader”. The guests wear fur coats and Rolex watches, and sit at a mahogany table, eating delicacies flown in from the Tokyo Tsukiji fish market by private jet. Following the meal, the host raises his hand: “a glittering disco globe came down from the ceiling and the Joy Brigade began strutting in pink hot pants to a banned American pop song”. One couple, a senior party official and his wife, whose story we are following, are among those obliged to dance. Suddenly the mood changes, and the evening ends with the official shot dead, and his wife and son, Yongju, forced to flee the totalitarian state across the heavily patrolled border into China.

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A poem by alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears at The Cortland Review:

Always wrapped in her red sweater, Frances walked
against the wind. First when the fields were open

and onions stung the air. Then when bare beams
rose into frames, reaching up from fertile soil.

Split-levels took shape and filled with strangers,
and Frances walked among them, her hair

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“Jesus Said,” a 15-poem sequence by alum Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03) appears at Mudlark:

Jesus said to me Did you mean

to draw some moral
from your own life, how you found love

so late? How though you weren’t patient,
weren’t kind, in pursuit were ruthless,

it was given to you anyway? Though
that story’s not done, not proven,

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Note: Five poems from the sequence originally appeared in the American Poetry Review; the whole sequence will appear again in The Orison Anthology, 2017, and the first poem of the sequence will be issued as a letterpress printed broadside from the Center for Book Arts in New York City, in connection with a reading there, fall 2016.

Audio interviews and poems by alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) are featured at Fishouse Poetry. Following is an excerpt from the poem “The Dead”:

They worry I won’t keep the graves when they’re gone.
See my mother brushing off her hands

at her mother’s grave, surveying lots,
approving and disapproving care and neglect,

my father deep in thought. The trees above
them are the gods of Massachusetts, big-

Continue reading online. An interview with Kerrin about her debut collection Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes is also up at Ploughshares’ blog: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/the-poems-toggle-between-wreckages-an-interview-with-kerrin-mccadden/.

A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations by alum Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) is out now from Apprentice House Press. The following is an excerpt:

The grass surrounding the retreat house stands waist-high, an entire spring’s lush growth left uncut through the thirty days of Saga Dawa, the holy month of the Buddha’s enlightenment. To kill or even to disturb the hordes of sentient beings living on and inside and beneath the tangle would be inauspicious in this season.

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