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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Alumni Updates

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 as part of Appalachian State University’s Diversity Lecture Series.  The two were also featured in March at the Duncan Women’s History Lecture Series, part of UNC Greensboro’s observance of Women’s History Month.  This appearance was especially meaningful, as Greensboro was the site of the February 1, 1960 sit-in that helped usher in the Civil Rights era.

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Mother’s Day

Alumni Patrick Donnelly’s poem “Cradle Song,” featured today on Poetry Daily:

CRADLE-SONG
When I signed for her ashes
I received her, as once
            she received me
into her lyric hold
            and let me ride anchor there,
smaller than the letter alif....[Keep Reading]…
“Cradle Song” is from Patrick’s recently published collection Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin (2012, Four Way Books).


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