Two poems by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appear at Tinderbox Poetry:
On Watching Old Movies
After dry cleaner, after supermarket, after housework;
after Windex, after Pledge, after Joy; after Woolite, after All, after Bounce;
after he comes home at five, after dinner at six, after TV at eight;
after the evening news, after the eight o’clock sitcoms, after Jon Stewart;
Continue reading “On Watching Old Movies” online (the second poem, titled “Gunnr,” can be read here)…
A poem by alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears at Tinderbox Poetry Journal:
He’d have drowned, without me. -Carl Phillips
They kept saying leave nothing out, I can still hear them saying
leave nothing out while I went on talking without a break
about the incident in the parking lot behind 7-Eleven.
Not really a parking lot, not the main one anyway,
but a lot behind that lot, behind the store, where clerks unloaded
Continue reading online…
Three poems by alum Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appear at Cultural Weekly:
Machine for Second Chances
Here we’ve tried blessing
the trauma, the fire to our skin
in which I’ve awoken crying who held the matches
into the matches of my hands.
What can I tell you? Love
held an iron’s cord to our necks, balanced
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Regan Huff (poetry, ’09) appears at The Collagist:
From a plane, the surface in all the contours
and the indistinct edges, the half-yellows
and off-whites and the thick, pasty, verging-on-blues
seems like the landing place
for lost humans, soft and accommodating
and at a remove from evil.
Continue reading online…
An interview with alum Lauren Alwan (fiction, ’08) about her 2016 Goldenberg Prize-winning story, “The Foreign Cinema” appears in Bellevue Literary Review:
What inspired you to write “The Foreign Cinema”?
The story was first written in grad school after I’d heard Pete Turchi’s lecture on stories with a short timeframe. I’d been writing stories based on my paternal grandmother’s life—she was born in Istanbul in 1906 and came to the U.S. newly married at 15—and because her life always struck me as monumental, I’d been thinking in great sweeps of time. The idea of a story that was narrow in its frame was appealing, and also freeing. So I gave myself strict parameters: the story had to take place over a meal, at a table, and the table I knew I’d use was the formal, old world one I knew from my grandmother’s house in Los Angeles.
Continue reading online…
Two poems by alum Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appear in diode:
Personal Effects
Tattered voting ballot. Business card smudged
with coffee. Medicare card. Senior center
card. Senior shuttle ID. Power port card
with implant date, reference number,
doctor’s phone. Expired coupon for coffee.
Receipt for overdue book fine. Torn fortunes
pulled from hollow cookies. Photo
of next of kin. Pizza card, fully stamped,
Continue reading this poem and the second (“In the Longest Hour”) online. A third poem also appears at TriQuarterly, titled “Processing,” along with a recorded reading by Ahmed.
Alum Kim Frank (fiction, ’11) has an essay about the exploration of a sunken ship featured at Sidetracked:
June 30th, 2015: time is running out. Day five of a week-long expedition and the too-swift current still carries considerable risk. The Aegean Sea is a magical turquoise that inspires a vision of Neptune rising, but that tranquil scenery belies what is happening beneath us. Placement of our diving vessel, the U-Boat Navigator, is crucial and we cheer as the mark we are waiting for appears on the sonar. We are directly above the wreck of the HMHS Britannic, Titanic’s sister ship, sunk by a German mine a century earlier.
Continue reading online…
Alum R
yan J. Burden (fiction, ’13) has won the 2016 Beacon Street Prize for fiction for his short story “Coming of Age.” About Ryan’s winning story, fiction judge Alexandra Kleeman writes, “With phenomenal grace, ‘Coming of Age’ succeeds at bringing the reader inside the mind of Mason, a child struggling to interpret the murky world in which he lives through the use of a dark, private mythology. Ryan J. Burden brings to life an age when real and unreal shade together uneasily, and anything you do seems to tangle the two further. A vivid piece, uncommonly intimate, this story will envelop you, touch you, and remind you of yourself, many years past.”
Alum JC Todd (poetry, ’90) received the 2016 Rita Dove Poetry Prize of the International Literary Awards sponsored by The Center for Women Writers at Salem College, NC for her poem, “The Girl in the Square.” Judge Blas Falconer writes, “I . . . kept returning to “The Girl in the Square.” The poem focuses on a very particular and perhaps seemingly arbitrary moment during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, using precise imagery and spareness of language to simultaneously render the enormity of the rebellion and the specific valiant sacrifices made by individuals for this historic event.
Alum 
Jayne Benjulian’s (poetry, ’13) debut poetry collection, Five Sextillion Atoms, was published in June by Saddle Road Press. Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) reviewed the collection at Women’s Voices for Change.
Alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) has an essay about the April 2016 Houston, Texas flooding published in the Houston Chronicle.
An interview with alum Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) titled “A Decade After Prison, a Poet Studies for the Bar Exam” appears at the New Yorker:
Reginald Dwayne Betts has wanted to be a lawyer for almost as long as he has wanted to be a poet. “Poetry and law have always been intertwined in my mind,” he said recently, “in part because poetry gives me the language to pretend that I can answer questions, even if I can’t.” We were in New Haven, Connecticut, and Betts was three days from his Yale Law School graduation. The bar exam was two months away. He was focussed on his final paper for an empirical-research class: twenty pages on critiques, in the media, of “broken windows” policing. He’d just begun examining about a hundred articles on the death of Eric Garner. As we searched for a parking space amid the commencement-weekend snarl, Betts described his growing interest in getting outside his own head and testing his ideas about the world—an interest that is changing his poetry as well. “I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of horrific experiences that have given me something to say,” he told me later. “I want to say other things, though.”
Continue reading the New Yorker interview online. You can also find a recent interview with Betts in Current Affairs.
A poem by alum Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05) appears at The Sundress Blog:
Continue reading online…
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