An interview with alum Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03) appears at the Pine Hills Review:

It seems like you’ve done everything. You’re a poet, a photographer, a director, a producer, a playwright. Is there one specific genre or medium you’ve always dreamed of working in that you haven’t yet touched?

Years ago, I wrote a play, Prayers for the Invisible Men. It was performed in an off-off-Broadway theater. Once was enough for that. And the truth is, it was a poem that really go out of hand. There was also a time, years back, when I thought of writing a screenplay. Hey, I live in Los Angeles. But I came to my senses. Los Angeles doesn’t need another screenwriter.

I sometimes play with the idea of writing creative nonfiction about poetry. I have a manuscript titled Ironmongery. In that book, I explain everything in the world. For instance, I have a short piece about fog. Most people will tell you fog is a cloud touching the ground. But I tell the truth about fog—it’s unresolved poetic thought. Yeah, I better stick to poetry.

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A poem by alum Francine Conley (poetry, ’14) appears at The Collagist:

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A poem by alum Fay Dillof (poetry, ’15) appears in Shadowgraph Quarterly:

Now trees, that tree,

part dead, part red, where plums,

who knows when, the seasons exploding

into one another, will form

and then it’ll be

a competition: squirrels v the height

we reach on chairs. And the heart

is not the pit but the hard bite

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A poem by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appears at the  HIV Here & Now website, a 365-day countdown in poems to 35 years of AIDS on June 5, 2016.

But if you do not worship, you will immediately be cast into the midst of a furnace of blazing fire; and what god is there who can deliver you out of my hands?
—Daniel 3:15

Tied at my mouth, tongue knotted with my tongue,
this stone this knife this bitter herb—older
than Easter with rusty thumbnails digging
into the skin on the sides of my chest—
exhaled stale breath into my lungs, pushing
sand and hot and grit inside inflating
until I hovered halfway between floor
and ceiling my lips blistered with cold sores.

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A story by alum Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears in the Kenyon Review:

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Chicago, city of crabgrass and gleaming lakeshore, listen.

Yanet was a bride when she first saw you, with a craving for babies like a craving for a smoke. She loved your margins, those peripheral neighborhoods where botánicas hid like spider webs in corners. How many times she passed and thought of a trabajito, a red candle for Santa Barbara (patron saint of the disenchanted), or a cigar for Changó (Yoruban and now Cuban god of revenge), and of course the foreign incantations that would vanish you for a moment like the fog that sometimes engulfed downtown completely. She loved your Aztec virgins, the ones who paraded up and down Western Avenue in red dresses so tight she could see every ripple on their thighs. She loved your seedy jazz clubs and the old foreign women no one bothered to stop and listen to.

Continue reading an excerpt of the story online. The full story can be found in the January/February 2016 edition of the Kenyon Review. You can also find a conversation with Leslie about the process of writing “My Amor, My China, Mi Delirio” and other topics at the Kenyon Review’s website.