An interview with alumna Helen Hooper (fiction, ’09) appears at American Short Fiction:

Few things are more disappointing than a predictable work of fiction, but one worse thing is the work of fiction that aims to surprise but falls flat. There’s a big, fat, twist in November’s online exclusive work of fiction, “Edge Habitat,” by Helen Hooper. It’s a particularly welcome twist because, well, it blindsided us. We recently emailed Hooper and asked her to tell us a bit about that twist, her other work, and about her previous life as a DC-based policy analyst with The Nature Conservancy. 

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A poem by alumnus Nate Pritts (poetry, ’00) appears at Four Way Review:

Wasps keep circling
the shutters, long stalks
of grass dangling
from thin back legs,
and when they crawl between the slats
into the small dark,
they bring their greeny materials
with them.

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A story by alumnus Edward Porter (fiction, ’07) appears at The Hudson Review:

Stephanie Kamkowski had been screening carry-on at Kennedy Airport for three years when someone said that an Arab guy had come onto the day shift. Sitting in the Houlihan’s before work, she thought she had him pegged: a dark-haired, dark-complexioned middle-aged man of slender build, standing at the breakfast buffet wearing a Yankees cap. He frowned at the chaf­ing dishes of ham, bacon, and eggs, and placed an orange and a yogurt on his plastic tray. Later, she saw him in the break room, and at the boarding security line for Delta, observing. He ate by himself and disappeared after each shift. Freddie Novak the shift supervisor called him Eee-mad, but the rest of them called him “the Arab guy.”

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A new piece by alumna Dawn Abeita (fiction, ’96) appears in the Belle Rêve Literary Journal:

The baby ran away. The baby was always running away. Like a leaf, he would skitter off down the gutter. And so she was left to leave affairs mid-stride, to dash half bent, scuttling crab-like after, trying to catch a hand. She was a mean, mean mommy, yelling in the street.

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Three poems by alumna Sara Quinn Rivara (poetry, ’02) appear at Blackbird:

Lake Ice

The length of a first marriage: eternity, shore-fast ice
creeping onto the Lake. In such cold, when told to sing, stones

fell from my throat; when told to sit still, knees hum.
So the Lake chews the pier when told to be quiet, sand

runs in frozen ridges up the dune. It’s all done; the mouth
unfolds its origami cranes. Was I the wife who cowered

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