A poem by faculty member Daniel Tobin appears at Plume Poetry:

It abides in secret on my pencil tip—
Greenland graphite, fossil bodies, the spans
of lost beginnings hoarded from the deeps
into softest stone across geologic time
to bring its word here for the wind to edit,
dawn quickened in folds of a stringent pool.

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An essay by faculty member Robin Romm appears at Gulf Coast:

Recently, I was talking to my friend, Camas, at a party when the subject of our college admittance essays came up. I haven’t done a lot of thinking about this particular bit of writing in the past two decades, though at the time, it certainly loomed large. Camas and I had the same English teacher our senior year. Ms. Barbini was a rail-thin woman whose life had dealt her many blows, all of which she told us about with alarming forthrightness and frankness.  One of the most severe tragedies Ms. Barbini had undergone was the loss of her sister and brother-in-law in a car accident.  Though she already had a disabled son, she became the guardian of her traumatized niece.  This niece, we were told as we sat in that classroom, waiting for the ding of the buzzer to release us, while many things (a musician, artistic, resilient) was not a good student.  She had outsized ambitions, Ms. Barbini felt, for getting into college. She had her heart set on Reed. With her grades and her SAT scores, she would need to write the end all be all of college essays in order to get in.
I’m going to take a risk and actually tell you what Ms. Barbini told us. You might find it repellent, but the truth is often repellant and writers must be brave.

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A poem by faculty member Tony Hoagland appears in The New Yorker. Read it online here.

The story “In Our Country” by faculty member Caitlin Horrocks appears at Waxwing:

This country used to be pronounced like this. Now we pronounce it like this. Old people, or foreign people, you know them from the way they say it: wrong. There is famine in that country now. There is plague. Now no one goes there. Even the people who live there, they try to leave. This country — and when I say this country I never mean my country, I mean this other country, over there — was once one country but now it is four. This country is now two. This country still pretends to be one but is really one hundred.

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A poem by faculty member C. Dale Young appears at The Collagist:

At Lake Merced

Some men go down to the river.
I went down, instead, to the lake, the air
silent and stretched tightly over it,

the water unmoved and dangerously still.
Some men move past such a scene
without even the slightest notice of it.

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