Four Poems by Gabrielle Calvocoressi appear in The Kenyon Review Online:

[There’s a point]

There’s a point where it all gets still,

    when the Bandleader’s there between the branches

of my fingers. When I cover my eyes

   as if to block out. To the left of us,

to the left of the city an hour away,

[. . . continue reading ‘[There’s a point]’ and three other poems here.]

Faculty member Liam Callanan is the 2017 winner of the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters.

According to the announcement in America “Liam’s contributions to the Catholic literary tradition are extraordinary,” said Matt Malone, S.J., president and editor in chief of America Media. “Liam Callanan has continually produced work that leaves the reader wanting more,” Father Malone said. “This prize is awarded in part to recognize future promise,” said the Rev. Robert Beloin, chaplain of Saint Thomas More Chapel & Center at Yale University, “and in the case of Liam, we have no doubt that there is still so much more to come.”

According to its website, The George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts & Letters is awarded annually by the trustees of America and The Saint Thomas More Chapel and Center at Yale University. The mission of the Hunt Prize is five-fold:

To promote scholarship, the advancement of learning and the rigor of thoughtful, religious expression;
To support and promote a new generation of journalists, authors and scholars;
To memorialize the life and work of George W. Hunt, S.J.;
To forge a lasting partnership between America and the Saint Thomas More Chapel and Center at Yale University, two places that were central to Father George Hunt’s life and work;
To support the intellectual formation, artistic innovation and civic involvement of young writers.

Read the full prize announcement here.

Faculty Member C. J. Hribal’s Story “Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)” was selected by Ha Jin as a winner of the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, 2017.  (This is the second year in a row a member of the WWC/MFA community has won this award.)

The Bellevue Literary Review has an interview with C.J. on their website.  It includes a link to the winning story.

What inspired you to write “Do I Look Sick To You”?

I was very much in love with someone who’d had a very rare form of cancer before I knew her. It came roaring back—very aggressive, very resistant to treatment—just as we were talking about marriage. I ended up taking two sets of notes. One set was just trying to keep track of the avalanche of information that was bombarding us—about the disease itself, about treatment protocols, about the drugs and their side effects and the drugs they were using to help alleviate the symptoms of the other drugs they were using. Another set of notes was my emotional response to what was happening to her, to me, to us.

Two things came out of that second set of notes. One was that cancer affects everything, every nook and cranny of your life, and I hadn’t seen a lot written about how it affects intimacy. The other was that there’s a weird counter-narrative out there. We use war and battle metaphors when talking about cancer—we “fight” it. And because we love happy endings, one narrative that’s out there unintentionally is that if you fight it and will it hard enough, you can beat cancer, and if cancer “wins,” then you weren’t fighting or trying hard enough. The first part of that narrative is understandable, even necessary. The second part is pernicious. There are many types of cancer, and some offer you essentially zero chance of survival. I’ve had friends and well-meaning people—cancer survivors—who’ve unintentionally conveyed that message, and part of what was behind this story was giving voice to the rage and to all the other complex emotions people feel when they are “fighting” and “losing” a “battle” they had no chance of “winning.” This doesn’t mean you don’t fight, but sometimes cancer does hold all the cards. Eventually what matters is that we treat each other with kindness and with tenderness.

Read the rest of the interview here:  INTERVIEW WITH CJ

And read the award winning story here:  Do I Look Sick To You? (Notes on How to Make Love to a Cancer Patient)

An essay by Peter Orner (fiction) appears in Guernica:

After the Earthquake: Oral Histories on Life, Death & Survival in Port-au-Prince, Haiti

by Peter Orner

Five years ago Dr. Evan Lyon, a physician who has worked in Haiti since 1996, and I began to conduct interviews with residents of the city of Port-au-Prince. We set out with considerable help from Laura Scott, Jean Pierre Marseille, Katie Kane, Doug Ford, and Edward Loiseau. The project started with a simple notion: What’s life like on the streets of Haiti’s largest city since the cataclysmic earthquake of January 12, 2010? There are number of good books about Haiti, but too many of them, it seemed to us, interpreted life in “the poorest country in the western hemisphere” through the lens of an outsider. We wanted to create a book that, so much as possible, might give a reader an unmitigated view of the struggle to survive–and endure–in, yes, one of the poorest but also, one of the most vibrant cities in our hemisphere.