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

1
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.

 

 

Three poems by alum Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09) appear at The Collagist:

Tale

We have
always wanted
a way home—

a way home
to that house
in the forest

a house by turns
loving and cruel

if only because
to love
is to suffer

inconsolably.
To be eaten
alive by it.

Continue reading Tale and Dilruba’s second and third poems, Resolution and Ghazal, online…

Two poems by alum Martha Zweig (poetry, ’98) appear at Waxwing Literary:

Fever Blessing

                   maggot: archaic, a whimsical fancy

Short work a day’s malaise
has made of me! Thus far I body forth
what you see before you: crank
of sickbed arts, toilet articles, nighttable
tumbler of ice, a black cracker, white-hot bulb
peeping from under its ruched shade, irritable
minority of which? (or another?) one
bookish hallucination I might pick.

Continue reading Fever Blessing and Martha’s second poem, Minna, online….

A poem by alum Rose Auslander (poetry, '15) appears at Tupelo Quarterly:

Dear wild-water child who does not wish to have a name,

            Last night, I had another of those dreams:
your many limbs were juggling your
removed breasts on the high wire. No fanfare, no applause,
only a sharp snap, frayed rope ends flying,
only lights out, after nothing broke
your fall.

Continue reading online…

A number of Warren Wilson faculty, alums and current students will be participating in more than 30 readings, panels and craft lectures at the 2016 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Los Angeles, March 30 – April 2.

Programming will include a WWC MFA Program 40th Anniverary Reading featuring Debra Allbery, program director, and faculty members Pablo Medina,  Gabrielle Calvocoressi,  Charles Baxter and A. Van Jordan. WWC faculty members and alums will also host a panel titled, “Diversifying MFA Programs: A Case Study,” about the WWC MFA program’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusiveness within the faculty and student body.

You can find the full schedule of WWC MFA programming at AWP here: WWCMFA at AWP 2016.