Alumni Updates

Mimi Herman (fiction, ’91): Mimi’s poetry chapbook, Logophilia, will be available August 21st from Main Street Rag Publishing.  The book will be released as part of the publisher’s Author’s Choice Chapbook Series.

The Dead Bury the Dead

from Logophilia

The dead are burying the dead
with small abandoned shovels borrowed
from children’s sandcastles.

Remarkably patient, they dig until dawn,
then replace the shovels in time
for the mothers, over breakfast, to remind

the children to bring in their toys.
Boys will, in fact, be boys
and girls will remain girls,

while the dead remake the world as we sleep,
knowing it is their job to keep
grief buried, one small shovelful at a time…[Read more at Main Street Rag]…

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Reginald Dwayne Betts in The Nation

Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) was recently interviewed by Sri Lankan newpaper, The Nation:

I think I just write what I’m focusing on, what is troubling me, what I want to think more about. In the past I haven’t tried to confront certain issues with the justice system directly in poetry – write poems that deal with juvenile certification, or the drug trade. Now though, I feel like for the poems to be true to me they have to work those ideas in, because I know to do that, I’ll end up challenging myself as a writer. I’ll end up figuring out how to be poetic and not dogmatic, or how to be both...[Read the Full Interview]…

Reginald is the author of the poetry collection Shahid Reads His Own Palm (2010, Alice James Books).

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Alumni Updates

Susan Sterling (fiction, ’92): Susan’s novel Dancing in the Kitchen is now available as an ebook from Publerati.  The novel is one of five chosen for the publisher’s initial launch.

Dancing in the Kitchen (then titled “Ashes”) sat around, unfinished and seemingly unfinishable for three years after I graduated, and then I braved my first Post-MFA Conference where Dale Neal (fiction, ’89) urged me to participate the next summer in the novelists’ roundtable. There were many later years I didn’t work on it, but the conference restored my faith in its possibilities, a faith I never quite lost, and gave me invaluable readers and some of my closest friends.

And yes, I’ll be there this summer, excited to see everyone!

~Susan

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Alumni Updates

Bob Ayres (poetry, ‘93):  Bob’s first collection of poems, Shadow of Wings, is just out from Main Street Rag Publishing Company.  Bob’s manuscript was recommend by Gail Peck (poetry, ’87) for the  Author’s Choice Chapbook Series.  Shadow of Wings is available at mainstreetrag.com

Shadow of Wings

What will it be like to open that door
if when I do a folded piece of paper
drops to the floor, and I bend down
to pick it up and see my name?

Remember the first day of junior high
gripping the colorless plastic tray
queasy, uncertain where to sit
in that sea of kids?

Or younger, standing at the porcelain sink
milky-white as a pre-dawn sky
hands cupped to catch the water fall?

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Alumni Updates

Greg Pierce (fiction, 2012):  Greg was recently featured in a New York Times article about his collaboration with Tony Award-winning composer John Kander:

Throughout May Mr. Pierce has been juggling their musical, “The Landing,” a triptych about love and obsession that is now running Off Broadway, with rehearsals for “Slowgirl,” his tense new play about a troubled young woman visiting her uncle in Costa Rica. Both projects are attention-grabbers: “Slowgirl” is next month’s inaugural production at Lincoln Center Theater’s new stage, the Claire Tow, while “The Landing” is no less than Mr. Pierce’s debut as lyricist and book writer at the side of a musical theater legend...[Keep Reading]…

Photo courtesy NY Times.com

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Alumni Updates

Natalie Serber (fiction, ’05): Natalie’s story “Developmental Blah Blah” is up in serial this week at Five Chapters.com:

Developmental Blah Blah — Part One

Mini cupcakes — iced,  sprinkled, and dressed in ruffled paper wrappers — lined the pastry case like a jolly marching band. Cassie leaned forward to peer in at all the tiny perfection. “I don’t know…He’s going to be fifty.”

The young woman behind the counter, bleak and gothic with kohl-lined eyes, a metal stud flashing high on her cheek like a hammered-in beauty mark, and thick black sweatbands on both wrists, was a flesh-and-blood contradiction to the buoyant mural on the wall behind her — rainbows and bluebirds.

“Little cupcakes seem appropriate for an eight-year-old girl’s birthday party. Are these too hopeful?” …[Keep Reading]…

Natalie is the author of Shout Her Lovely Name (2012, Houghton Mifflin).

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Alumni Updates

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 (2008, Cascade Press).

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Alumni Updates

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]…

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Alumni Updates

Joan Frank (fiction, ’96): Joan’s new novel Make It Stay is now available from The Permanent Press.  Her book of collected essays, Because You Have To: A Writing Life, will be available in September from Notre Dame Press.

 

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Alumni Updates

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 me

to ask if I’m Jewish. I show him the framed photo
I carry: a family of nine. Pale faces, strong noses; black hair

parted or pulled back; the children dressed like the parents.
He says, They, are they Jewish? I don’t know, I say...[Keep Reading]…

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