A story by alum Lara Markstein (fiction, ’13) appears at AGNI Online:

I.

When I was eighteen, I lived in a small shared flat with an American and a German on an alley off Nguyen Thi Minh Khai in Saigon. That was the year I practiced waiting—for the monsoons to end, my money to run out, the coffee at cafes to muddy the sweetened condensed milk I drank by the glass between English classes I pretended to teach. Kirsten—the American—called herself a Communications Director for a nearby law firm. Her job consisted of poaching articles for the company newsletter and I imagined her boiling paragraphs until the words toughened in white, rubber strips. Hans was involved with elevators—the exact nature of his work was too difficult to understand. He had wanted to fly airplanes once, but after failing to certify four times, had packed a single army duffel and headed east, still weightless, as he would be for the rest of his life.

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An interview with alum Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears at the Kenyon Review:

What was your original impetus for writing “A Prerogative”? Did you begin with the setting? With a character? With a line of dialogue or description?

I think the story grew out of a strange coincidence of all those elements. I was studying under Stephen Dobyns at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers—which means I was also studying Dobyns, reading his poetry—and reading works he assigned in hopes they would help me learn how to write this novel I started after Kevin McIlvoy suggested a short story might go farther.

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Two poems by alum Noah Stetzer (poetry, ’14) appear online at A&U Magazine:

Measure of a Man

Numbers crowd this room: T-cells, viral load,
telephone, clocks, oxygen, and the day.
Longitude and latitude place us here

in the ICU. Chalk on the blackboard
graphs numbers on the axis, show the curve
of my distinction. A barcoded wrist

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An excerpt about Philip Levine from alum Anna Clark’s (fiction, ’07) book Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden appears at Belt Magazine:

Philip Levine’s father came to the United States from Russia, traveling across the ocean all by himself at age eleven. He grew up in New York City with two older sisters and their families. His path to Detroit was an extraordinary one: he enlisted in the English army, was stationed in Palestine and conjured a new identity (including a new passport) in Cairo.

Or at least, those are the stories Levine was told as a child. The poet, who died on February 14, 2015 at age 87, was also told that he had Spanish ancestry. That was not true, but it catalyzed Levine’s lifelong fascination with Spanish politics, culture and literature.

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Work by alumni Valerie Bandura (poetry, ’02), Laurie Saurborn Young (poetry, ’08), and Rachel Howard (fiction, ’09) in featured in the Spring 2015 issue of Waxwing Literary Journal. You can read the journal online here.