A poem by alum Abigail Wender (poetry, ’08) appears at The Cortland Review:
Give me dice, sticks, stones, knucklebones,
read the dog’s liver, bird’s flight.
If I choose a god to worship,
if I pin a white flag in my lapel,
will I find him pocketing my last twenty?
Continue reading (and listen to Abigail read the poem) online…
A poem by alum Meghan O’Rourke (poetry, ’05) appears at The Poetry Foundation:
Continue reading online…
An interview with alum Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) about her collection Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes appears at the Beloit Poetry Journal. You can read the interview online. You can also find her poem “Burial” in the same issue.
A poem by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Fogged Clarity:
There’s a teenager in an SUV, shopping mall, or nightclub
with an imaginary shotgun. The weapon belongs to him,
but he doesn’t—he can’t—know it’s there. That’s one problem
with an imaginary shotgun: if one is unaware of its existence,
one might feel safe enough to forget about the possibilities,
to hope the night sky is glorious, and the birds
Continue reading online…
A poem by alum Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) appears at Fogged Clarity:
I painted my lover
on a lake.
Since then, the fish
bathe her every morning
and slide slippers on her
feet every night.
Continue reading online…
A piece by alum Krys Lee (fiction, ’08) appears at The Center for Fiction:
Once there was a child who hid from her father. She imagined him with blades for hands, she saw herself as strung on a leash that he owned. She was afraid, but she was eight years old and there was nowhere she could go or hide, except in the closet, where she would eventually be found. But she discovered that books were other houses to hide in, and when you read a book, you were no longer you. You were no longer an immigrant in California struck dumb by language, you were no longer a young girl. She did not ask herself if fiction mattered, but she read fiction as if it mattered. Fiction saves lives, she wrote in firmly printed letters in her diary (she had not learned cursive yet) and underlined those words. This is a true story, though the stories she wrote later when she grew up were not true, at least not in the prosaic sense.
Continue reading online…
Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03) and Stephen D. Miller’s co-translations of Japanese poems in The Wind from Vulture Peak: The Buddhification of Japanese Waka in the Heian Period (Cornell East Asia Series, 2013) have been awarded the 2015-2016 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture at Columbia University. Established in 1979 and including a monetary award, it is the oldest prize for Japanese literary translation in the United States; previous winners include W.S. Merwin. The award ceremony will be held December 11th at Columbia University. You can find more information here.
A poem by alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears at The Collagist:
What bounces back sticks like a bone in the throat.
I don’t accept
that my Delivery to the following recipient
failed permanently.
Continue reading online…
We are pleased to announce that the 2016 Alumni Conference is slated to be held June 22 through June 28 at our home campus in beautiful Swannanoa, where we’ll be joining Program students, faculty, and friends on the evening of the 28th for the Program’s 40th Anniversary Gala. Otherwise we’ll be gathering for our usual fare: fiction, poetry, and mixed workshops, manuscript reviews and roundtables for detailed consideration of longer works, classes, panels, caucuses and, of course, the best reading series (and the best audience) you’ll ever have. Not to mention the hiking trails, Snake Lake, Asheville scene, unbelievable dinner companions, gatherings formal and informal, and Dancing. Oh yeah, and writing time. And writers, every one of us. Read more
A story by alum Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02) appears at Hollywood Dementia:
The legal case all hinged on a semicolon. Any fool could see it, and Champs was no fool. Not at $1,750 an hour and a big retainer. Why didn’t he see it?
It wasn’t as if one word glittered more than another, obscuring what was true. His hand trembled with that telltale shake, but he could still read. It was a matter of outcomes. Clients paid for them. Lawyers produced them. One way or another.
Continue reading online…
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