Alumni Updates

Maya Janson (poetry, ’06): Maya’s debut poetry collection Murmur & Crush  is now available from Levellers Press.

Murmur
This is for the woman in pigtails on the median strip
holding a hand-lettered sign: Find what you love
and follow it. It’s the day before the vernal equinox
and there’s so much standing about in sandals
amidst mounds of discouraged snow, so much
refraction in the cathedral that it’s hard to hear
the inner sparrow. The birds come in
on the in-tide and then they’re trapped.
There’s a man wearing a tee-shirt, logo of
boots and spurs on his chest. Emblazoned.
Like the slash of white
across the muzzle of your favorite horse.
And the couple at the corner table, whispering
into each other’s mouth, stroking each other’s hands
and cheekbones like there’s something hidden there.
There is always something hidden there.
Think of your past as the study of plate tectonics.
Once in the Upper Peninsula in the car of a stranger.
Once beneath a train trestle.
Certain truths abide.
Nobody wants to be the poor in spirit.
Everyone loves a good downpour.
Visit the publisher’s website for more information or to purchase.
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Alumni Updates

Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10): Rose’s poem “Story with a Real Beast and a Little Blood in it” is online at Slate:

The night the bull broke loose,
there was much to learn. Like,
when a bull lowers his head to charge,|
step close. This is when you can
slip a rope around his neck. Or,
when the men, butted and bruised
with rope burned  hands, give up,
make a path of sweet feed...[Keep Reading]…

Rose is the author of The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (2012, Four Way).

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Alumni Updates

Corey Campbell (fiction, ’12): Corey’s story “Introduction to Airborne Radar” appears in the latest issue of Conte:

In October—or if you listen to the local DJs, Rocktober—Delia, her mom, this snooty ski-society woman Peg, and I sit in a Chinese restaurant in Vail. Lunchtime on a Friday. Parent-teacher conferences are this week, so the high school gave us the day off. I’m sixteen. I was supposed to spend the day with Ernie, but he decided to take an extra shift down at Bowles Crossing Cineplex instead. He told me this in voicemail—said he needed gas money—and I had no way to talk back. I left him my own message filled with my dumb enthusiasm, cringing even before I put the phone down, though I still meant it.

Delia and her mom drove us up here from Littleton this morning. I’m staying with them while my parents are in Glenwood with this weird religious couple they met online. They go on retreats every so often—“to bullet-proof their marriage,” they say—and finally I’m old enough to be left behind.

In fall and winter, the Rocky Mountains wear their name—dark, jagged, and iceberg-like. And though I hate driving on ice, and would have been fine staying home alone with my CD player and some movies, I know that traveling in them, even for a few hours, always feels like a massive, head-clearing journey, only broken by the return to the suburbs hours later...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Another & Another

Another & Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series, edited by Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) and Ross White (poetry, ’08), is now available from Bull City Press.

The anthology celebrates finished poems the first two years of The Grind Daily Writing Series, a loose community of writers who write a new draft each day.  The volume features a number of Warren Wilson poetry grads, including: Dilruba Ahmed (’09), Larissa Vidal Amir (’07), Reginald Dwayne Betts (’10), Jonathan Bennett Bonilla (’10), Chiyuma Elliott (’10), Jenny Johnson (’11), Henry Kearney IV (’08), Karen Llagas (’07), Chloe Martinez (’09), Jamaal May (’11), Sally Molini (’04), Victoria Bosch Murray (’08), David Ruekberg (’04), Mary Jo Thompson (’09), Angela Narciso Torres (’09), Rosalynde Vas Dias (’06), W. Vandoren Wheeler (’02), and Laurie Saurborn Young (’08).

The book is available for order at bullcitypress.com
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Alumni Updates

Matt Hart (poetry, ’02): Matt’s poem “Mountain Man” appears in the online poetry magazine LEVELER.  Matt is the editor of the online journal Forklift, Ohio, and author of Wolf Face (2011, H_NGM_N Books).

Joanne Dominique Dwyer (poetry, ’09): Joanne’s poem “Dialogue de  Sourds“ appears in the current issue of the New England Review (Vol. 33, 2012).

Joe Schuster (fiction, ’91): Joe’s essay “Thirty Years of Re-Reading Lucky Jim” is featured at The Millions.  Joe is the author of the novel, The Might Have Been (2012, Ballantine).

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Alumni Updates

Mark Prudowsky (poetry, ’08), Elisabeth Lewis Corley (poetry, ’10) and Victoria Bosch Murray (poetry, ’08) all have poems currently online at mahmag.org (magazine of arts and humanities).

Mark Prudowsky, “Neighbors”

Elisabeth Lewis Corley, “First Person Plural”

Victoria Bosch Murray, “Traveling Mercies”

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Alumni Updates

Agica (Aggie) Zivaljevic (fiction, ’05): Aggie’s story “Eva’s Room,” which took third place in the Summer Literary Seminars’ 2012 Unified Literary Contest, appears in the current issue of Joyland Magazine.

After the sun sets behind the bakery, and the sky turns a dark Prussian blue, the children feverishly play their sweetest games before being called in. From the hilltop they see how the downtown lights cast a golden glow on the glass dome of the City Hall, in the center of old Sarajevo. They hear the rattling of the streetcars below, and the barking of stray dogs in the Mt. Trebevic suburbs. The twilight breeze lures them with the river’s scent. Brothers and sisters can always go home and play or fight, but children without siblings cannot.

Eva cannot go home now. The yellow jersey shorts, showing her bronzed legs to the boys, and her mother’s buying power to the neighbors, are ruined. Eva’s mother Stella bought them for her eleventh birthday...[Keep Reading]…

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Catherine Barnett Wins James Laughlin Award

Catherine Barnett (poetry, ’02) has won the Academy of American Poets’ 2012 James Laughlin Award, which “honors a second book of original poetry, in English, by a living citizen of the United States…  Offered since 1954, it is the only second-book award for poetry in the United States.”

Judge April Bernard wrote that Catherine’s book, The Game of Boxes (2012, Graywolf). “…builds a complex poetic structure in which fundamental questions about motherhood, trust, eroticism, and spiritual meaning are posed and then set into motion in relation to one another. The mind is delighted, the spirit enthralled, by this wonderful book.”  This year’s books were judged by Bernard, Cyrus Cassells and Dana Levin.

Past faculty members who have won the award include Lisel Mueller (1975, The Private Life), Larry Levis (1976, The Afterlife) and Tony Hoagland (1997, Donkey Gospel).

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“A Feria”

A short piece by Rolf Yngve (fiction, ’12) appears at The Common, a journal of “fiction, essays, poetry, documentary vignettes, and images that embody particular times and places both real and imagined.”

People would tell us to go see the big tree, and finally we flagged ourselves into one of the cheap cabs that go between Santa Maria del Tule and Oaxaca de Juarez on a set route. It was getting dark early under an overcast sky, the remains from tropical storm Ernesto, who had petered out after making some news in the Yucatan.

We found the big tree, a knob made for the grip of some great giant who could use it to lift the entire town – the entire state – out of the Mexican ground. It seemed to squat between the mayoral offices and the church. All the nearby buildings clung to earth like the homes of dwarves...[Keep Reading]…

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Alumni Updates

Christine Fadden (fiction, ’09): Christine’s story “The Smallest Bones Break” is featured online at Gulf Coast:

Grandmother’s summerhouse is where Uncle lets Cousin fall from a highchair. Niece hears the ensuing chaos from where she is watching TV, on the front porch. The Bionic Woman is trying to convince her Indian student, Paco, that she is not a spirit. Now, thirty years later, Niece is living with Aunt and Uncle while getting her PhD in acoustical engineering at the university they both have retired from, Cousin has just had a baby, and Aunt tells Uncle he will not be trusted alone with new Granddaughter—ever—because of Fall From Highchair ca. 1973. Also, the plastic water bottles he buys because of his need to drink lots of water (because of his organ transplant), and to most conveniently monitor the amount of water he drinks, are polluting the planet “for Granddaughter.”  …[Keep Reading]…

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