An interview with alum Jynne Dilling Martin (poetry, ’06) appears at NPR:

Last year, a poet arrived at the end of the earth: Jynne Dilling Martin spent six weeks, funded by the National Science Foundation, living in Antarctica.

She spent the summer (winter, to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) shadowing scientists as they went about their work, and writing about the people who call the icy continent home.

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(You can also listen to the recorded interview and find an excerpt from Jynne’s collection We Mammals In Hospitable Times at the link.)

An essay by alum Leslie Contreras Schwartz (poetry, ’11) appears at Dame Magazine:

While sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office recently, I found myself picking up an academic journal, when something caught my eye: an article called “The Starvation Experiment.” The article I read was about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, a research project between 1944–1945 in which volunteers underwent starvation for the purpose of studying the psychological effects on its subjects.

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A poem by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appears at The Good Men Project:

This morning I reached for your name that fresh
white word, the cool wet sound of it inside
my mouth; I grasped and came up with nothing,

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An essay by alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at Brevity:

In the filming of The Crow, the only son of Bruce Lee is shot and killed while making a movie about a man who gets shot and killed. Detroit is on fire. It’s Devil’s Night. Sirens everywhere. In the movie version of this essay, he’s resurrected and seeks revenge. In this way, he reminds us of Jesus: to die in the name of the father and return at a later date. But in real life, a bullet blazes from a revolver that’s supposed to be loaded with blanks and down goes Brandon Lee. Six hours of surgery later, he dies.

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A poem by alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) appears in Ploughshares:

Under her tongue, there was a story.
In her mouth, nails. Frances hammered license plates
to the back wall of her garage. There

hang the years that sunk like a foot in loose soil.
That rusted like a hinge. Whose hand or what machine
etched the numbers that cruised along

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The poem “Degas’s Bather” by Beverley Bie Brahic (poetry, ’06) appears in The Times Literary Supplement. It has republished here courtesy of The Times Literary Supplement:

DEGAS’S BATHER

The orchards of the internet have rooms
for my virtual museums, and portals
to fancies I suppress—Roman revels
enhanced with sound effects, like my neighbour
this noon in his condo, earthquake water
stacked prudently on his porch,
a redwood to shade our double windows.

Sounds like he’s surfed a porno flick. Her yelps
ring out in waves like ripples a pebble
makes, plopped into water. And here’s the jug
she’ll sluice her back with in a second
or a century: longing’s embodiment
as I polish off my chicken breast, chased
with last night’s wine, my foraged plum.

Alum Lee Prusik (fiction, ‘12) was a finalist in the bosque journal 2014 fiction contest. Her story, “An Aptitude for Bird,” appears in the fourth annual issue. Copies are available here.

 

81cewhpEjGLAlum Jynne Dilling Martin’s (poetry, ’06) collection We Mammals in Hospitable Times has been published by Carnegie Mellon.

Alum Robert Rorke (fiction, ’10) has written about the television drama series based on alum Natalie Baszile’s (fiction, ’07) novel Queen Sugar for The New York Post:

10915115_10153074570289588_5284513006207358786_oOprah Winfrey and Ava DuVernay, who first worked together on the Oscar-nominated civil rights drama “Selma,” will re-team on “Queen Sugar,” a drama series for Winfrey’s cable network, OWN, that goes into production later this year.

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An essay by alumnus Fred Arroyo (fiction, ’97) appears at Origins:

In the fall of 1992 I began attending Purdue University as an English major. I was a first-generation college student, and I was trying to take an imaginative leap outside my family and class. Books held no value in my family, and though my mother attended night school to receive her GED, my father only had a third grade education. My parents never had any advice, wisdom, or financial means to help me. These are my origins and I felt at the time that I needed to escape them.

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Five poems by alumna Colleen Abel (poetry, ’04) appear at The Collagist:

NiobeLetter to an Agoraphobic FatherDouble CaryatidAlternate EndingsNamesake