An interview with alums Shadab Zeest Hashmi (poetry, ’09) and Alicia Jo Rabins (poetry, ’09) appears on  the San Diego Writers, Ink website:

How does a poem come to you?

Shadab: Poetry casts its net when the unsayable offers itself, often triggered by a collision between a sensory moment and a feeling. It animates the abstract by appearing as a fine gradation of color, sound or scent, a sensation counterpoised against a memory. A poem comes to me as a sudden, partial illumination of the unanswered, perhaps the unanswerable, as experienced in music, or visual images of both the monumental and the intimate. A poem seeks to make its own lexicon, to attempt to define and describe the world as seen through the psyche’s filter.

A story by alum Michelle Collins Anderson (fiction, ’13) appears at Literal Latté:

I got the note in Esmé’s backpack this afternoon: her long black cape has become “a distraction to the class” and she is no longer welcome to wear it to school. There was no mention of the wand. It is difficult to be a wizard among “Muggles” — your average, run-of-the-mill human beings. Just as I am finding it difficult to be human when I would gladly summon magic or pray for miracles. Justin is with the hospice nurse now. She is checking his vital signs, making notes, checking the log of medications — the amounts, the times given — that I keep so meticulously, my letters curling around the white spaces of the chart. Soon she will bathe him, a sponge bath that will clean away the perspiration but will not erase the yellow of his skin. She will let me do the shampooing and the shaving: I insist. Justin was not — is not — a vain man, but he did love his hair. It is thick and black and edged with gray; he liked to keep it just the slightest bit long, which gave him the rumpled professor look I love. He is an artist, a painter, but made his living as the creative director at a local ad agency — overseeing all the words and images that go into ads and commercials and websites. He is what they call a “creative guru,” a “big idea” man: he sees forest, not trees; constellations rather than stars.

Continue reading online…

Alum Samantha Hunt’s (fiction, ’99) novel MR. SPLITFOOT was published in January by Houghton Mifflin.

Alum Nan Cuba (fiction, ’89) won the 2016 Jesse H. Jones Memorial Fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters. She will live for six months on J. Frank Dobie’s 250-acre Paisano ranch outside Austin and receive an $18,000 award.

Alum Beverly Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06) has one poem, “Black Box,” in the current (fall 2015) issue of Field (available in print).

Alum Patricia Corbus’s (poetry, ’96) collection of poems Finestra’s Window has been published by Off the Grid Press. Finestra’s Window is the 2015 prize winner of this press’s nationwide contest.

Finestra’s Window begins with the line, “Open the sky-box, Uncle,” and the poems which follow refuse to sit still. In Tony Hoagland’s words, “Finestra’s Window is a collection full of mortal daring and formal bravado. Corbus’s work amazes and delights me, as it will any reader of poetry.”

Finestra’s Window can be purchased online at: http://offthegridpress.net/.

Alum Bob Oldshue (fiction, ’05) won the 2016 Iowa Short Fiction Award for his short story collection titled November Storm. Judge Bennett Sims says: “Robert Oldshue writes stories that are as rich and self-complicating as novels. Set mostly in Boston, November Storm explores that city—like Stuart Dybek’s Chicago or Edward P. Jones’s D.C.—through the layers of its characters’ memories. Whether he’s writing from the point of view of a haunted psychiatrist, a gay prostitute weathering the AIDS epidemic, or a night watchman at a cemetery, Oldshue proceeds by patiently excavating the past from every place, unearthing a character’s associations and experiences—often in long, spiraling, masterful sentences—until what feels like an entire life has been disclosed. Here a twenty-page story seems deeper—more densely sedimented with consciousness and retrospection—than most two-hundred-page books. This is a sensitive and accomplished collection.”

Alum Diana Lambert’s (fiction, ’01) short story, “That Your Reality Is The Only Reality,” was the third place winner in Glimmer Train’s September 2015 Family Matters Contest.

Alum Elisabeth Hamilton (fiction, ’13) has a short story, “Grown-up Behaviors” published in the  Winter 2015 issue of The Cincinnati Review (available in print).