A piece by alumna Marta Maretich (’91) appears at Boom California:

“Please go away,” the handwritten sign says. “It’s not worth getting a bullet in your ass.” The sign is taped to the wall in the kitchen of the house my family abandoned in Bakersfield.

“I guess they couldn’t read,” my neighbor Mario says and laughs nervously. The house has become a magnet for criminals, a mid-century, ranch-style fortress to be defended by Mario. “Right here’s where I shot through the door.”

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An interview with alumna Leslie Blanco (fiction, ’07) appears at Pank Magazine:

1. Workshops and publishers often demand that writers categorize their work along tradition lines of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, but I see short shorts, such as your pieces here, as something like poems and fiction at once. Where would you plot your own work on the genre continuum?

Interesting that you should ask this question of these particular stories, because I have categorized all of them alternately as nonfiction, poetry and finally, fiction. Many years ago I went through a difficult divorce, and I could only write about the emotions I felt by jotting down tiny little scenarios. Anything longer was too painful. At the time I thought of them as autobiographical prose poems, which I thought I was writing only for myself.

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An interview with alumnus Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13) appears at The Collagist:

Can you tell me a little bit about the origins of “Love Elegy in the Chinese Garden, with Koi”?

Well, the cause of the poem (if we’re considering the poem itself as an effect) was an excursion to the Huntington Botanical Gardens in Pasadena, CA. I’d met an attractive woman, who also seemed attracted to me, and we took this trip together—as friends. As you might imagine, there was good amount of tension and anxiety between us as we moved through the gardens. As a result, my early drafts of this poem, originally a triptych, attempted to explore the sense of anxiety between two people who could potentially become lovers.

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A poem by alumnus Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) appears at Kweli:

I. Micah Michael Zamir Betts

November’s flame in that year of hard sunsets,
of winter’s plangency & days where sleeplessness
& cognac ran together.
All our thoughts were beginnings,
and you were the roundness
that grew to a moon
above your mother’s hips.

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Friends of Writers congratulates alumna Alicia Jo Rabins (poetry, ’09), who has been awarded the 2015 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for her manuscript Malkhut. More information can be found here.