Alumni Updates

Glenis Redmond (poetry, ’11): Glenis’ poem “We Stored Up” is part of the 75 Artful Days of Summer at N.C. Arts Everyday:

We Stored Up

Honeysuckle’s perfumed song
is a real head turner, a whiplashing beauty.
When she come ‘round everybody
wants a chance to dance with that yellow gal.

Her dress-ripple and smell good ways
made a body want to shake loose
from winter’s cage. We fit summer
into Saturdays and Sundays.

All we had back then seemed like plenty.
Good eatin: Garden greens plenty,
blackberries, plums and cantaloupe.
We burst watermelons right in the field...[Keep Reading]…

Glenis is the author of Under the Sun (2008, Main Street Rag) and Backbone (2000, Underground Epics).

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Alumni Updates

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (poetry, ’09): Elizabeth’s seven poem sequence “Bamiyan” appeared in summer 2012 issue of the New Haven Review.  The poems were influenced by the 2001 destruction of the Bamiyan great Buddha statues by Taliban forces.  Elizabeth lived in the region during the winter of 1972.

AL MUHAYMIN [“The Guardian”]

December 1972

Before sleep, wrapped against the cold,
reliving the way in:

++++++++++++++++ that turn,
below the Shebar Pass, where the road
grew thin, uneven, where the wild dog
staggered at us, blind,
rabid, ravenous.
How Qadir, the driver’s friend,
opened the door and shot him.

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Alumni Updates

Mike Puican (poetry, ’09): Mike’s poems appear online at the Jet Fuel Literary Review.

Through Slender Branches
Storm Clouds Scatter to Reveal
a New Winter Moon

Three men in black wool
winter coats—ankle-length, waist-
tied and buttoned down—

stand holding hand rails
while staring at transit signs,
their phones, the woman

who is sitting and
gazing out the window. She’s
also dressed in black.

The windows darken
as the train descends into
the subway tunnel.

Overhead a sky-
blue bank ad in which a boy
in yellow shorts beams.

…[Read All]…

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Alumni Updates

Jynne Martin (poetry, ’06): Jynne’s poem “How Long is the Coast of Britain” appears in the Spring 2012 issue of Granta.

How Long is the Coast of Britain?

Eels loop frantic in buckets of blood,
the log aflame cracks as it collapses to ash,

but the shot doe slackens in silence.
It is the hour for farewells. It is the hour

for suckling the stray, for swaddling the runt,
a last chance to smooth back your hair...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09): Dilruba was recently interviewed by fellow alum Justin Bigos (poetry, ’08) for the American Literary Review.

At a recent poetry reading, an audience member described poets as people who have a sixth sense, a kind of super-sensory power that allows them to detect things that are not readily apparent to others. I think that’s probably accurate—that poets possess a kind of hyper-sensitivity to people and places, to relationships and history, to language and its capacity to capture/shape/disrupt experience, and to the collision of imagination and perception in making sense of the world. So maybe it’s just that sensitivity that lends poets the kind of double vision you describe—permitting them to fashion, for example, from two unlike things a powerful metaphor that transforms understanding and helps us see the world anew, or to somehow stand simultaneously here and there...[Read the full interview]…

Dilruba is the author of Dhaka Dust: Poems (2011, Graywolf), winner of the 2010 Bakeless Prize for Poetry.

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Alumni Updates

Jasmine Beach-Ferrara (fiction, ’01): Jasmine recently visited the White House for the third annual LGBT Pride Month reception.

It was a pretty incredible experience, and an honor, being in that space … the experience of having the doors of the White House not just opened to LGBT people, but so warmly opened, and saying, ‘You’re a part of this country,’” she said. “It left me with a lot of hope of what’s possible as we move forward.

Read the full article at Asheville’s Citizen-Times

Jasmine is Executive Director of the Campaign for Southern Equality.

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Alumni Updates

Catherine Barnett (poetry, ’02): Catherine’s poems “Categories of Understanding,” “From the Doorway,” and “Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid” appear in the Summer 2012 issue of the Kenyon Review Online.

Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid

Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.

Click here to read all

Catherine is the author of The Game of Boxes: Poems (2012, Graywolf).

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Alumni Updates

Muriel Nelson (poetry, ’06): Muriel’s poem “Borage” was recently featured in the Producing Poetry blog series at the Seattle Times:

Borage

Odorlessness of oxygen,
cold taste of cucumber,
touch of moth — tender,
barely felt, nearly
soundless in the mouth —
the appearance of borage in the garden is
like a multitude of eyes.

To eat or drink any flower is odd.
But to take this one in wine or salad
not for courage, but for color,
is to take this bloom forgetful
of its lore as it flies
on a breeze whole,
as eyes take eyes
with a glance,

and naturally,
unknowingly,
particle by particle,
swallow
God.

Read the full article

Muriel is the author of the poetry collection Most Wanted (2003, ByLine Press).

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Alumni Updates

RJ Gibson (poetry, ’11): RJ’s chapbook You Could Learn a Lot has been named co-winner the 2012 Editor’s Prize from Seven Kitchens Press.  The book is scheduled for release this winter.

His previous collection, Scavenge, won the 2009 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize, also from Seven Kitchens.

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