Two poems by alumnus Ian Randall Wilson (poetry, ’02) appear online in Shadowgraph Magazine:
Praise Diligence
The family asks you to write
the shape of beauty
oh lethal tree
oh cloud
curved like death
shall your lies go on and on?
Cat on My Lap
No matter what promises
the world makes
always an end…
Continue reading online at Shadowgraph Magazine.
Eight Scholarships of $500 each are available for this summer’s WWC Alumni Writing Conference.
Alumni who wouldn’t be able to attend without some assistance are invited to submit their names to the Conference Coordinator by April 11. Details available at wwcmfa.org.
The Greenhouse, a chapbook by alumna Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet (poetry, ’05), has been awarded the 2014 Frost Place Chapbook Contest Sponsored by Bull City Press. The Greenhouse will be published in August 2014. Stonestreet will attend the 2014 Frost Place Poetry Seminar as the second Frost Place Chapbook Fellow. She will have the opportunity to reside in the Frost Place Museum for one week in September 2014.
Alumni Jeremy Bass (poetry, ’10) and Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.‘s (poetry, ’09) chapbooks were also named as finalists in the competition.
Read more about Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet and the Frost Place Chapbook Contest Sponsored by Bull City Press.
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Alumna Rebecca Foust (poetry, ’10) has been named the 2014 Dartmouth Poet-In-Residence at the Frost Place. The program “supports working poets by providing them the space and time to devote to their craft.” Foust will spend an eight-week summer residency in poet Robert Frost’s former farmhouse, and give a series of public readings across the region, including at Dartmouth College.
Read more about Rebecca Foust and the Frost Poet-In-Residence Program.
A new poem by alumna Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. (poetry, ’09) appears online in New Orleans Review:
Sermon
Because that’s how you break through, said Blake.
How you see desire for what it is.
His brown hair was matting nicely, his loincloth
getting the hang of him. He had some chants down pat
and nicely-emerging ribs. Om-most there, he quipped,
striking a pose. The horse’s ass-ana, I believe,
said Greg quietly, and we braced ourselves
for another one on the virtue
of sitting still among charred tibias and pariah dogs.
Of trying to keep it hard but not come. Of that
No.
Alumnus Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) has been selected as a 2014-2016 Kenyon Review Fellow. Read more about this award online at The Kenyon Review.
Alumna Nan Cuba‘s (fiction, ’89) novel, Body and Bread, has been awarded the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction.
A new poem by alumna Caroline Mar (poetry, ’13) appears online at The Collagist:
Ritual
In the woods, the air is cool, damp.
I love the way the earth smells, decay
of old redwoods, soft hush
of some prehistoric morning. I remember
waking as a kid at camp after outside
overnights, those most exciting nights, how
my nose would itch with the dust
of the dirt beneath my sleeping bag.
…
Finish reading online at The Collagist.
An excerpt from a novel-in-progress by alumna Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09) appears online in The American Literary Review:
The Geometry of Changing Course
Driving to work one day in 2009, I heard Kalas’ voice on the radio.
I heard people talking about his voice.
It was a radio tribute.
Kalas had collapsed due to heart failure, before the Phillies vs. Nationals game, in the broadcasters’ box. He was rushed to the hospital, and he died.
It took just two words, two of Kalas’ words, to throw me back to June of 1980 at the Jersey shore—to the summer my sister and I would stay with our grandmother for the entire three months without our parents.
The summer of great wins and great losses.
The summer of men–
the sort a girl can look up to,
the sort a girl should never be alone with,
and the kind that really lets a girl down.
You just have to know how it feels to have spent every summer of your girlhood under the spell of Harry Kalas’ “Outta here!” How with everything else going on, that man’s voice always did, and always will, fill you with more goodness than watermelon in July.
…
Finish reading online at The American Literary Review.
The dates are set and registration is open for this year’s Alumni Writing Conference in South Hadley, MA.
Details, deadlines, and scholarship information are available at the MFA website, but it’s definitely not too early to begin thinking about teaching a class: have you been reading or rereading a poet or writer who knocks your socks off? Been considering a new angle on craft or form? We’ve also had Panel and Caucus discussions on matters such as conducting research, structuring collections, maintaining novel-writing momentum, and much more.
These will be the smartest, most engaged peers you’ll find, so start jotting those notes and secure a class slot when you register.
For more information, please visit www.wwcmfa.org.
A new story by alumnus Edward Porter (fiction, ’07) appears online in Printer’s Devil Review:
A Proposal
She was late. She was always late, and he was used to waiting for her like this, in a stupor of nerves and fever. Gerald sat in a Windsor chair, looking down from the window on the descending terraces of formal gardens outside the hotel room. The Virginia hills resort swam in flowers: crocuses in the gardens, tulips in vases, rose-pattern drapes and bedspread. It was stuffy; it stank of old money. All the better, he felt, for secret fucking.
He had driven down the day before from New Jersey. She was arriving by plane today. They had picked out the resort on the internet, at her house in the suburbs, while her husband was at Columbia Presybterian renovating a forty-nine-year-old socialite’s face. Something special, Grace said, for their two-year anniversary. He wore tight jeans and a white sleeveless tee shirt – that was how Grace wanted him to dress for her. When he could no longer bear sitting, he went into the bathroom to reexamine his shave and touch it up with a dry razor. Then he flung himself on the bed face down, giving himself at least the pressure of his body against the rose-covered tessellation of the quilt – the large squares were softly resistant, like breasts.
…
Finish reading online.
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