Alumni Conference Scholarships Available

This Friday, April 11, is the deadline for submitting a request for one of the scholarships for the Alumni Writing Conference at Mt. Holyoke College.
Those who couldn’t attend the Conference otherwise should submit their names, either by email or post-marked snail mail, whether they graduated in Poetry or Fiction and when, and, should they be traveling to South Hadley from greater than 1500 miles, their home addresses.
Requests should be sent to the Conference Coordinator, with contact information available at wwcmfa.org.
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Poet of the Week for The Paris-American: James Franco

Alumnus James Franco (poetry, ’12) is the featured poet for The Paris-American this week. His poem, “Film Sonnet,” appears online:

You, Monica Vitti, with your lips, like fruit, how could
That guy in L’avventura be blamed for forgetting
The other pouty bitch? If I got a new life I’d pray for
A girl like you. The island where you lose your friend,
Deserted and mysterious. And then after looking
All over Italy for her, you fall for him. And what is
It that compels him, in the aftermath of that party? …

Continue reading online at The Paris-American.

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“1982, Revisited” by Justin Bigos

A new essay by alumnus Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) appears online at Bending Genre:

1982, Revisited

On March 19, 1982, a group of Argentine scrap metal merchants raised the flag of their nation on the coastal, British-occupied island of South Georgia. In the next two weeks, Argentina invaded the island, and then the Falkland Islands, assuming Britain would retaliate.

By June 14, ten weeks later, Argentina had surrendered to Britain. Argentina had lost 649 military, Britain 255. Three Falkland Island civilians had been killed. This is what Wikipedia tells me. In April 1982, I turned seven years old. I lived on Linwood Avenue, on the second floor of a three-family home, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with my mother, sister, and – for a year or two by this time, I can’t remember – my mother’s new man, whom she would marry in the summer of 1983.

Read more

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New Poetry by Ian Randall Wilson

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.

 

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Alumni Conference Scholarships Available

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.

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Alumni Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet and Rebecca Foust Win 2014 Frost Place Awards

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.

…

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.

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“Sermon” by Elizabeth T. Gray Jr.

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.

 …
Continue reading online at New Orleans Review.
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Awards for Alumni Nan Cuba and Jamaal May

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.

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“Ritual” by Caroline M. Mar

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.

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“The Geometry of Changing Course” by Christine Fadden

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. 

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