“The Mathematician’s Daughter,” a short story by Sonja Srinivasan (Fiction ’19) was recently published by The Write Launch. Read an excerpt below:

The Mathematician’s Daughter (A Modern Victorian Tale)

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. She jerks her head up with a start and sees the clock–9:40 a.m. There just might be time! There just might be time if Nancy runs fast enough, time to see John and confess her love for him. She has been working on a proof all night and has fallen asleep at her desk and is late, is late, for a very important date, and now she doesn’t know if she can catch him before he catches his plane. But how quickly can she descend that damn staircase that begins outside her door, the staircase that is an endless Fibonacci sequence that spirals and spirals down? Those old worn stones might cause her to trip over and chip a tooth, the fragment cleaving off in a perfect right triangle. She runs faster and faster, her hair trailing behind her, her footsteps echoing off the walls. These old Oxford colleges like Magdalen are more trouble than they are worth, though they are prestigious and date back from the 13^th? 14^th? 15^th? Century, full of lore and history and funded by the coffers of kings and dukes and marquises, for they are damp and chilly and dark, unwelcome places to call one’s abode.

Read the rest of this story here: https://thewritelaunch.com/2020/05/the-mathematicians-daughter/

Poetry faculty member Sandra Lim recently had a poem featured in The New Republic. Read an excerpt of “That Are” below:

That Are

Then I became this stupid, trilling thing:
what I desired was to become obscene.

All the things I had loved up to then
fell away in the long struggle between winter and spring.

And then there was my body, inside of my soul.
It had different aspirations.

What form does it take without the soul?

Find the rest of this poem at The New Republic.

The Rumpus recently interviewed poetry graduate Victoria Chang about her latest collection, Obit. Read an excerpt below:

The Rumpus: Obit got deep really quickly! I would say it’s a book about grieving.

Victoria Chang: Yes, although it’s not about one specific kind of grieving. I wanted to describe how awful a person can feel in the process of any kind of grieving. Putting words to that depth of pain, and breadth of pain, and a pain that is so unidentifiable, that doesn’t want to be snatched or grabbed or touched. In essence, I think, in hindsight, I tried to distill grief and give language to something I knew would be impossible to describe. Ultimately, I think I failed, because I don’t think grief can be described. I think, in retrospect, it was a challenge to see if it could be done anyway.

Rumpus: How did you get the idea to put obituary poems into a collection?

Chang: I just started writing them once the idea of writing one popped into my head. I wrote one, then another, then another, and another, and just kept on going for two weeks straight. I hardly ate, hardly slept, and hardly spoke to anyone….

Read the rest of the interview here: https://therumpus.net/2020/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-victoria-chang-2/

“The Sorry-Ass Truth,” a story by fiction alumna Tracy Winn, was recently featured in the Four Way Review. Read an excerpt below:

The Sorry-Ass Truth

The Blackhawk hunkers in the pasture by the river like a video game beast, spiky and dark. Mikey slogs toward the helicopter, soaked with tiredness, lugging the baby, her ticket out. She’s ready to lie down in the sopping field, sink her banged-up body deep into the mess left by the flood and skip whatever comes next. But she has thirty-seven thousand dollars waiting for her in New York City. 
            A bug-eyed town official and a National Guard trooper with tattoos up to his ears scan a clipboard next to the chopper, which hasn’t started up yet.
            Mikey holds the baby the way she’s seen other new mothers do it, rapt, like she’s in love. She can’t feel bad for being hell-bent. When the streams overflowed they washed out the roads, the power and phone lines drowned, the cell tower collapsed. The storm made an island of the town—cut the place off from even the nearest mountains. This ride is the only way out.

Read the rest of Winn’s story here: http://fourwayreview.com/the-sorry-ass-truth-by-tracy-winn/

“where water has no skin,” a poem by J.C. Todd (Poetry ’90), was recently featured on Parks & Points. Read an excerpt below:

where water has no skin

no boundary, no bank or basin

where air is ambient water

            a saturate, a cloud

where mosses swim, tethered by fiber

            to the leafy canopy they populate

aerial dancers unlike the crouched tufts

            underfoot on the trail

Read the rest of this poem here: https://www.parksandpoints.com/poetry-2020/where-water-has-no-skin