Jenny Johnson (poetry, ’11) is a poet and educator based in Pittsburgh whose first collection of poems, In Full Velvet, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2017. She was recently honored with a 2015 Whiting Award. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2012, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, New England Review, Troubling the Line: Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics, and elsewhere. She won Beloit Poetry Journal ’s 2011 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize. She has also received awards and scholarships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, The Pittsburgh Foundation, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She earned her M.F.A. in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. Currently, she is a Lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh where she teaches writing and gender studies. As a Hodder Felllow, she will begin work on her second book of poems. 

The full announcement is available here:  http://arts.princeton.edu/news/2016/01/five-artists-named-2016-17-hodder-fellows/

A poem by alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) appears at the Beloit Poetry Journal:

I want to tell you about the thud against the back door,
that my man says, “bird.” That later we see its tail
sticking out from underneath the siding. That its
tail feathers shine like oil, shifting purple to blue,

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A piece by alum Nick Fox (fiction, ’09) appears at The Museum of Americana:

He was a dropout, a hobo, an oyster poacher. He was an excellent sailor, a less-excellent rancher, a deeply committed socialist, a boxing fanatic, an early ecologist. He was an alcoholic, a voracious reader, a boat builder, a failed gold miner and, in the language of the day, “a bastard.” He was perhaps the greatest adventure writer America has ever produced.

And he was the first writer whose work I fell in love with.

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An interview with alum Lenore Myka (fiction, ’09), conducted by alum Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13) appears at Fiction Writers Review:

Eudora Welty referred to setting/location as, “the ground conductor of all the currents of emotion and belief.” The more specific the place, the more resonant and meaningful the action. How does location/setting function in King of the Gypsies?

A long time ago, I heard an elderly writer lament the lack of setting in the stories his students were producing in some MFA program somewhere. I do feel there is an absence of setting in the stories of my students. My younger students say that “description is boring,” as if description were synonymous with place. And yet, when you read people like Carver or Beattie, writers who were called, for better or worse, minimalists, I feel a deeply rooted sense of place in their stories. It’s because their characters embody those places in some mysterious way. It’s ye olde iceberg, right? Even if the place doesn’t go into the story, it’s there in the writer’s mind and through some strange process of osmosis reveals itself on the page somehow.

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A story by alum Mindy Friddle (fiction, ’05) appears at Steel Toe Review:

She found the crumpled receipt in his favorite pair of jeans. Silk camisole, fishnet black, garter black, peep-toe pumps red. One hundred thirteen dollars and fifty-one cents and thank you for shopping at Minerva’s Closet. Paid in cash. August 23 at 8:42 p.m. Yesterday. His bowling league night.

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