Lee Polevoi (fiction ’93): Lee was recently interviewed by Highbrow Magazine, where he is Chief Book Critic:
What’s the worst job/assignment you’ve ever had?
A year spent as a copywriter at a wildly dysfunctional boutique ad agency. One condition of employment: Mandatory karaoke at the annual retreat. The horror! …[Keep Reading]…
Lee is the author of The Moon in Deep Winter
Joseph M. Schuster (Fiction ’91): Joe’s essay “Reference Point: Fathers and Sons” is up at The Millions. He’s also written an essay for Largehearted Boy as part of their “Book Notes” series, where authors “create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.” Joe’s playlist complements his novel The Might Have Been (2012, Ballantine).
“The Tracks of My Tears,” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
While my novel never mentions this Motown classic by name, this is precisely the sort of song I had in mind when I describe, in a couple of places, the high school dances Edward Everett would have gone to when he was a teenager, like the dances I went to a few years later than when he would have been in school, when couples would cling to each other under subdued lights in an overheated gymnasium, not so much dancing as turning slowly in tidy circles, feeling the weight of their love and lust for the two and a half or three minutes the song lasted, all the while the song they were dancing to was often about heartbreak...[Keep Reading]…
Joan Frank (fiction, ’96): Joan’s new novel Make It Stay
Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08): Justin has two new poems in iO: A Journal of New American Poetry, “Twenty Thousand Pigeons” and “St. Patrick’s Day, Chicago.”
TWENTY THOUSAND PIGEONS
In my dream last night, back again on the corner
of Avenue J and 14th, a rabbinical student stops meto ask if I’m Jewish. I show him the framed photo
I carry: a family of nine. Pale faces, strong noses; black hairparted or pulled back; the children dressed like the parents.
He says, They, are they Jewish? I don’t know, I say...[Keep Reading]…
Faith S. Holsaert (fiction ’82): Faith’s story “September Snow” received an honorable mention in the Doris Betts Fiction Prize at North Carolina Literary Review.
On April 24, Faith and co-editor Martha Noonan read from Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC
Alumni Patrick Donnelly’s poem “Cradle Song,” featured today on Poetry Daily:
CRADLE-SONGWhen I signed for her ashesI received her, as onceshe received meinto her lyric holdand let me ride anchor there,smaller than the letter alif....[Keep Reading]…
(2012, Four Way Books).Alumna Rose McLarney’s poem “Gather” is up at Poets.org:
Gather
Some springs, apples bloom too soon.
The trees have grown here for a hundred years, and are still quick
to trust that the frost has finished. Some springs,
pink petals turn black. Those summers, the orchards are empty
and quiet. No reason for the bees to come...[Keep Reading]…
Rose is the author of The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (2012, Four Way Books).
2002 – 2004 Joan Beebe Fellow Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, now director of the Campaign for Southern Equality, speaks with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes about North Carolina’s anti-gay marriage amendment:
Billy Lombardo (fiction, ’09): Billy will be the writer-in-residence at Roosevelt University in Chicago for the 2012-2013 academic year.
Billy is the author of the novel, The Man With Two Arms (2011, Overlook).
Bones
(from, The Bones of His Being)
His skin gleams in the watery light, tautalong his chin, the knobbed hinge of jaw.Cheeks and temples sunk to nothing.“Doesn’t he have beautiful bones?”my mother says, quietly, so as not to wake him,and I think she must mean more than cheekbonesand brow – must mean the bonesof his being, seen clear through the loveand stubborn burrs tangled in their marriage.I think she is fixing this in memory.Sun spills reflections on the tiled floor,a wide lake. She is far from me,on the distant shore.
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