PhD student Katherine Arnoldi's collection of short stories, All Things Are Labor , the 2006 winner of the Juniper Prize for Fiction.was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2007. Katherine is also the author of The Amazing True Story of a Teenage Single Mom, a graphic memoir for young adults that was a 1998 “pick” by Entertainment Weekly, Redbook, Seventeen Magazine, Elle, Christian Science Monitor, and Ms. Magazine.
PhD student Jennifer Pashley's collection of short stories, States, was published by Lewis-Clark Press in October. Frederick Barthelme says of her stories: Pashley writes quick, tough dialog that cuts hard and scars, and her stories put you in places and circumstances you have little chance of getting to otherwise. . . Her work always stuns."
Two graduate students just completing their PhD's and four recent PhD's have all accepted tenure track positions. Deborah Poe will be a new assistant professor at Pace University in Pleasantville, NY, teaching creative writing, contemporary fiction, and theory. Jeremy Schraffenberger has accepted a similar offer from the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa to teach creative writing and literature while Jeremy's wife Adrianne Finley has accepted a position at Upper Iowa University in Fayette, Iowa, pulling off that rare feat of both members of a couple landing tenure track positions in communting distance of one another at the same time. Jane Alberdeston has been hired at the University of Puerto Rico; Anne Rashid will be teaching American Literature at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, PA; and Darlene Gold accepted a position at Tompkins-Cortland Community College in Dryden, NY. Congratulations and best of luck to you all in your new positions.
Director Maria Mazziotti Gillan started off 2008 by once again having multiple poems chosen for Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, this time with poems from her latest book, All That Lies Between Us. Her poem "Donna Laura" was read on January 4, and "After School on Ordinary Days" was read on January 8. Both poems are still available on the Almanac archive.
Also, All The Lies Between Us was honored, along with Rafael Campo's The Enemy, as the co-winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize from the New England Poetry Club. The prize ceremony will be at the Longfellow House on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Sunday July 13, 2008, where Maria will read with Rafael Campo. Judges were Katchig Mouradian and Patrice Wales.
Also, Professor Gillan's e anthology, Identity Lessons, (co-edited with her daughter Jennifer Gillan) has been chosen as the 2009 Book Day Selection for the Chattahoochee Valley College in Phoenix City, Alabama. The book was chosen by a committee of students and faculty, and Professor Gillan has been invited to read from the book and to discuss it at their campus on March 13, 2009.
PhD student Katherine Arnoldi has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the Mennonite Community in Paraguay and to continue her own creative writing in 2008-2009.
