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.
Alum 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:
Oprah 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:
Niobe, Letter to an Agoraphobic Father, Double Caryatid, Alternate Endings, Namesake
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 essay by alumna Alison Powell (fiction, ’10) appears at Boom California:
The United States is a country with two west coasts, separated by three thousand miles. Technically, there are three west coasts if you count the westward shores of Hawaii. In 2012, my bedroom in Tampa, Florida, faced the first of the three bodies of water standing between the Gulf and me. It is a coast, but not the coast. There’s water here, but no waves. The Gulf is neither sea nor ocean. It is a ragged basin with no clear territory. I am from the real West Coast, and this lesser western light won’t play for me. It has nothing to say, and its sunsets are merely warm-ups for California’s three hours later.
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