Three poems by alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appear in diode poetry journal:

Another Story About the Body

            after Robert Hass

The child keeps screaming in its highchair. The mother has examined its fingers, its fingernails, just beginning to form into something that can be called nails, the lips, mouth, tongue, back of the tongue, pink nub of tonsil, the child’s breath split pea soup and infant rage, or fear, the father thinks it’s fear, has looked around the kitchen for any sign of danger, black cat under the table, bear in the window, boogey man

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A poem by alum Mary Jo Thompson (poetry, ’09) appears in The Missouri Review:

I was the one who kept on speaking
while the iron pole of winter
was stuck to her tongue.

I watched her pry at the dish of her mouth,
her fingers bent like tines.
The wind cuffed at her, helped her decide
to pull away.

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While our email was down, we missed a poem by Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) titled “Abeyance,” published in the American Academy of Poets’ Poem-A-Day series:

                               letter to my transgender daughter

I made soup tonight, with cabbage, chard
and thyme picked outside our back door.
For this moment the room is warm and light,
and I can presume you safe somewhere.

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Find an essay on W.B. Yeats’ poem “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by Rebecca at Poetry Daily: http://poems.com/Poets’%20Picks%202015/0421_Foust.html

Mr. Splitfoot Samantha HuntAlum 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 Screen Shot 2015-12-21 at 8.54.10 PMby 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).

Two poems by alum Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) appear in the January 2016 issue of Poetry magazine:

Water Devil

Spout of a leaf,
listen out for the screams
of your relentless audience:
the applause of a waterfall
in the distance,

a hurricane looting
a Miami shopping mall.
How careful you are
with the rain-cradling curve
of your back.

Continue reading Water Devil and May’s second poem, Respiration, online.

A poem by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears in Poets.org’s Poem-a-Day series:

You whom I could not save,
Listen to me. 

Can we agree Kevlar
backpacks shouldn’t be needed

for children walking to school?
Those same children

also shouldn’t require a suit
of armor when standing

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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 2012Los 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/

 

Friends of Writers congratulates  Margaree Little (poetry, ’12) for receiving the Kenyon Review Fellowship.  Here is the announcement from the Kenyon Review blog:

From the start the searing quality of Margaree Little’s poems separated her from other superb candidates. Here is an excerpt from “The Heron,” a meditation on discovering an immigrant’s body in the desert of the American Southwest:

Read the poem and the the full post here: http://www.kenyonreview.org/2016/01/why-we-chose-them/

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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Two stories by alum David Rutschman (fiction, ’02) appear at the Kenyon Review:

The Devil’s New Red Axe

One day the devil appeared to a simple woodcutter and offered him a new red axe. The woodcutter, dazzled, accepted the axe, which was lighter and sharper than any he had ever seen. That morning, he chopped and stacked over a week’s worth of wood; that afternoon he chopped and stacked even more.

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