MFA@FLA Newsletter, Spring 2008

The MFA@FLA Newsletter makes public various enterprises, literary and not, of our graduates and faculty. It seeks to connect our graduates and to inform students considering applying to MFA@FLA of our accomplishments. The headnote is written by Padgett Powell, the balance by graduates, current students, and faculty.

Program News

MFA@FLA will convert from a two-year program to a three-year program, beginning with the class entering fall 2008.

LBOs

2007 was a heavy year for Literary-Biggee Obits: Mailer and Vonnegut, and our personal friend Grace Paley, too. She had read here three times, and she and Padgett Powell had recently read at the dedication of Barthelme papers in Houston, and we will miss her more than we know. Our friend Boris Yeltsin, who had not visited here, also died, and our good program friend Saul Bellow, who had, died we think the year before. We saw John Ashbery at eighty interviewed on Jim Lehrer and we were afraid he’d died too, but he has not. We feel a little shaky.

Alumni Reading Series

Dedra Johnson (MFA, 1995) read at Goerings from Sandrine’s Letter to Tomorrow (Ig Publishing, 2007), in town on a reading tour that slipped in under our radar. The book has received very good notice. John Brandon (MFA pending), on a McSweeney’s tour, was detected by radar and was to read from Arkansas (McSweeney’s, 2008) in February 2008, after which rabblerousery was to have been conducted at Shrimpfest, but, alas, the reading tour veered away from Florida at the last minute.

We had no poetry-alumni readings, on radar or off, but we might have had a bounteous season of it had they flown near:

Geoffrey Brock (MFA, 1998), trans., Antonia Arslan, Skylark Farm (Knopf, 2007)
Geoffrey Brock, ed. (with Marian Schwartz), Two Lines: Power (Center for the Art of Translation, 2007)
David Caplan (MFA, 1994), Poetic Form: An Introduction (Pearson Longman, 2007)
Richard Chess (MA, 1984), Third Temple (U. Tampa, 2007)
Andrew Kozma (MFA, 2002), City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007)

Undergrads

Our pipeline to Syracuse is bearing fruit: Jeff Parker (BA, 1995) read from Ovenman (Tin House, 2007) at Goerings in October, and Jason Ockert (BA, 1995) is out with Rabbit Punches (Low Fidelity Press, 2006). August J. Specht II (BA, 1987), who did not go to Syracuse, published How To Close Sale Appointments (iUniverse, 2005). The book is tight.

Two Listserves for Alums of MFA@FLA

The Alumni Association of MFA@FLA, which will be MFA@FLAAA when it is listed in the yellow pages, now has its own list serve: <crwalumni-l@lists.ufl.edu>. Contact Becky Soppe at <beckysoppe@hotmail.com> if you are a graduate and are not sure you are on this listserve. Anyone on the list can use it to communicate to the entire list.

Contact Carla Blount at <crw@english.ufl.edu> if you are a graduate and did not receive a solicitation to be in this Newsletter. The listserve we use at MFA@FLA (only we can post to it, and Carla maintains it) to communicate officially with graduates is different from the listserve noted above and run by Becky Soppe.

Please help us get these lists up to date.

Testimonials

These are written by the testifiers and are unedited. Errors of form are theirs theyownself’s.

Eve Adamson (MFA, 1992), <eadamson@mchsi.com>

This year, I won’t admit I’ve got arthritis.
I’ll say I’m taking yoga “just to try it,”
And not because of joints that creak to spite us.
A son who’s twelve? I patently deny it.

I’ll fess up to the Dummies Guides I’ve written –
The latest ones on Dachshunds and Shih Tzu.
I’ll talk about the dog show in Manhattan,
My trip to Paris, what the children do.

I’ll tell you diet writing is a pleasure.
I proudly penned a tome on “gluten-free.”
That poem on aging, coming out in Measure,
Is purely theoretical, you see.

So if I’m grayer since we saw each other,
If I’ve a wrinkle and you can perceive it,
It’s not because I’m old. I’m just a mother
Who’s forty-one (now say you don’t believe it!)

Deborah Ager (MFA, 1997)

Deborah Ager’s poetry collection, Midnight Voices, is forthcoming from WordTech in 2009. Poems from the collection have appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, New Letters, and Subtropics. 32 Poems < http://www.32poems.com>, the magazine Deborah started with John Poch (’97), thrives in its fourth year of publication. Poems from the magazine have appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets (2005 and 2006), Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Deborah read at the Virginia Festival of the Book in March 2007 and will present on a panel for the Washington Independent Writers in November 2007. Deborah Ager, Publisher 32 Poems Magazine <http://www.32poems.com> BLOG: <http://blog.32poems.com>

Jay Atkinson (MA, 1982), <jayatkinson3@yahoo.com>

My new book, Legends of Winter Hill (Crown Publishers, 2005) has spent six weeks on the Boston Globe bestseller list. My novel City in Amber will be published by Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama in 2007. I have an essay on playing ice hockey appearing in BestLife magazine, a spinoff of Men’s Health, in January 2006.

Chris Bachelder (MFA, 2002)

I live in the picturesque Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with my wife and two daughters, and I’m working very slowly on a novel about a guy who lives in the picturesque Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with his wife and two daughters.

Teresa Burns (MA, 1984; PhD Houston, 1993)

News? Professor at University of Wisconsin-Platteville, Director of Women’s Studies Program, having more success writing about the occult than writing fiction.

Articles and translations from last year available at:

<http://jwmt.org/v2n12/>
<http://jwmt.org/v2n13/>

Basically they are co-translations of John Dee’s Consecrated Book of Black Venus (first time in English) and Hieroglyphic Monad (first new translation in 50 years) plus three related articles, one by be and two co-authored.

All of this is turning into two books coming out next year, both available from Waning Moon Publications.
<http://waningmoon.com/publications/books/blackvenus/> and <http://waningmoon.com/publications/books/monad/>

Cheers,

Terri

David Caplan (MFA, 1993)

I am an Associate Professor at Ohio Wesleyan, writing poetry and literary criticism. In 2006 Oxford University Press published a paperback edition of Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form; that year Pearson Longman published Poetic Form: An Introduction. I am working on Rhyme’s Challenge (under contract, Oxford University Press) and essays for journals and edited collections that consider contemporary poetry and poetics. Also, my poetry manuscript, In the World He Created According to His Will, was accepted for publication for the University of Georgia/ VQR Series, to be published in Fall 2010.

Suzanne Carlton (MFA, 1996)

The news is that nothing has turned out as I expected. Last year I (and my husband) adopted a three year old girl from China: Amelie Zora Quiying. By the time she’s grown, we figure we’ll be wearing diapers and drooling. I love teaching at Santa Fe Community College; I teach mostly online. I still write but never enough. I have found that I like reading mysteries the Lillian Jackson Braun series. (I still read Flannery O’Connor and Tillie Olsen.) Oh, and I have 17 cats and a giant cat-fenced yard. Crazy.

Michael Cox (MA, 1988)

An essay of mine, “Visitor,” which appeared in Best American Essays 1999, has been selected by Lex Williford and Michael Martone for inclusion with 49 other essays in the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction. It will be out in August.

They surveyed “over 2000 freelance writers, workshop teachers and program directors, who nominated the contemporary nonfiction that they’d most like their students to read and discuss in their classes and workshops.” I’m really happy and really surprised. Now if someone would publish my story collection, I’d be a very happy man.

Cathy (Stallworth) Cox and I passed through Gainesville in December, on the way down to see her family in Tarpon Springs. Gainesville looked much the same. The University has done a lot of building since we left town, and it looks impressive. We passed by our old apartment in the Duck Pond, and I could not believe how much my chest swelled when I saw it. Gainesville was great; I miss it.

Geri Doran (MFA, 1995), <gsdoran@gmail.com>

I write this year from Eugene, Oregon. I’m currently visiting in the University of Oregon Creative Writing Program, where I teach a nice range of workshops and seminars, graduate and undergraduate. Last winter/spring I was a visitor in the MFA program at the University of Illinois at Urbana. (Itinerant teaching: a good way to see the country.) In between, I returned to Lisbon, city of my heart, for a summer of writing. New poems are recently out or forthcoming in The New Republic, Subtropics, Southwest Review and TriQuarterly.

Caterina Eppolito (MFA, 1992)

is having her article “Food for Thought” published by John Hopkins University Press in Poets on Prozac in April 2008.

Bessie Gantt (MFA, 2000), <bessiegantt@gmail.com>

My triplet boys turned four this summer and continue to run my life. For more check out my blog at <www.tripletmama.com>.

Debora Greger

I’ve been appointed the first Dunlevie Term Professor in the UF Honors Program, for 2008. My new book of poems, Men, Women, and Ghosts, will be published by Penguin in Fall ’08.

Stephanie Harrison (MFA, 2003)

I’m in Columbus, Ohio, teaching English to Somali refugees. (There are about 45000 of them here; it’s the second largest Somali community in the U.S.) They’re the best students I’ve ever had, although often “foncused.” I’m also working at a furious pace – or at least what is a furious pace for me – on a book I hope to finish in the spring. We all know how that can go…but that’s the plan.

Michael Hofmann

Michael Hofmann’s Selected Poems are due out in March in England. He has translations of Thomas Bernhard’s first novel, Frost (January), Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage (January), and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Other Stories (February) pending in
paperback, as also a paperback of his anthology, Twentieth Century German Poetry (March). He owes Poetry (Chicago) a piece on Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and The London Review of Books a piece on Basil Bunting, and means to select and translate from the letters of Joseph Roth later this year.

Noy Holland (MFA, 1994)

I am entering my eleventh year of teaching for the MFA Program at Umass. This year, I’m putting together the Juniper Festival for the MFA, celebrating the confluence of environmental science and literary art. I have stories recently out or forthcoming in Denver Quarterly; MOCAD, the literary magazine of the Detroit Museum of Art; and New York Tyrant.

Anton Janulis (MFA pending), <janulis_ap@yahoo.com>

I’ve been back from my service with the Peace Corps in Ukraine for a year now, and have established a sort of base camp in Chicago. I’m starting a late second unremunerative career as a bicycle racer. My first result was unimpressive, but not shaming, and in any case even a first place finish would have left me no richer (the prizes are often donated by bicycle shops from among the things they cannot sell). I’ve started to wonder if silence might not be a better reaction to most situations, personal or public, than anything I could actually say.

Noelle Kocot (Tomblin) (MFA, 1995)

My fourth book of poetry, Sunny Wednesday, will be out from Wave Books in spring, 2009.

Andrew Kozma (MFA, 2002)

Andrew Kozma has only a few things to report to the committee. 1. He graduated from University of Houston with his Ph.D. in May. 2. He will be traveling to Krakow, Poland, this fall for an undetermined length of time. 3. His first book of poetry, City of Regret, was published this September by Zone 3 Press.

Matt Ladd (MFA, 2006)

Since leaving Gainesville in 2006, I’ve had poems appear in Virginia Quarterly, Passages North, and Gulf Coast. Essays and reviews taken by Threepenny Review, West Branch, Prairie Schooner, and Birmingham Poetry Review. Also I received a $5000 prize from the Columbus Literary Awards program. I continue to dwell in spartan splendor with Miss Shevenock.

David Leavitt

2007. My novel, The Indian Clerk, was published and did well; it was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review (a first for me). I went to Australia and met a platypus, a wombat, and Les Murray. My father, Harold Leavitt, died at 85. An Italian newspaper memorialized as “Il Guru Dei Managers.” We brought out two issues of Subtropics. I learned the meaning of the word “lambrequin.” Now to use it!

William Logan

In the spring of 2006, I won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for The Undiscovered Country. A number of blogs reported scattered boos from the back of the audience – poets I’d reviewed, no doubt. In the past two years, I’ve published poems in the Atlantic, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Modern Review, New Criterion, New Letters, New Republic, New York Sun, New Yorker, Poetry, Salmagundi, Sewanee Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, TLS, and Yale Review. I have poems forthcoming in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Salmagundi, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Yale Review. I published a long piece on poetry criticism in Poetry, and reviews on Laurence Durrell in TLS, on Elizabeth Bishop in The New Criterion, and on Hart Crane, on Derek Walcott, and on the new Oxford Book of American Poetry, all in The New York Times Book Review. I also published the usual spring and fall verse chronicles in the New Criterion. I wrote a long piece on Thomas Pynchon’s new novel Against the Day for Virginia Quarterly Review, and another long piece on Robert Frost’s notebooks for Parnassus. My foreword to an anthology of the New Critics, the first in half a century, will appear next spring. In the fall of 2006, I was blogger of the week on the Poetry Foundation website (the blog is still up, if you care) and in the spring of 2007 I had a memoir on rock ‘n’ roll in Poetry Northwest. I read some poems by W. H. Auden at the Auden centenary celebration in the Folger Library in Washington. I also served as a panelist for the NEA grants in poetry. My new book of poetry, Strange Flesh, will be published by Penguin in the fall of 2008.

Michael Loughran (MFA, 2004), <mikeloughran2k@yahoo.com>

In September I moved to South Philadelphia; one car died, one was stolen, a third has a new mechanic and The Club. In the spring I will be married in Tunisia, Hawaii, or New Jersey. I read some poems here www.readab.com, which reading will be online eventually, and which series is wonderful for persons in NY. There are poems going up at the lovely Octopus Magazine soon.

Margaret Luongo (MFA, 2001), <luongomm@muohio.edu>

Billy and I are still in Ohio, and I am still teaching at Miami University in Oxford, OH. We bought an 85-year-old house in Hamilton (birthplace of Michelle Gould, MFA 2001). The house had bats, and we learned that the best tools for bat removal are heavy leather gloves and a large Folger’s coffee can. One of our neighbors slipped a copy of Rilke’s bat poem into our mailbox. We’re probably in the right town for us, if such a town exists in Ohio. We’ve met some nice writers at the University of Cincinnati, which is right now a holding area for UF alumni. I see Brian Smith, Peter Grimes, and Suzanne Warren once in a while, all of whom are in the program there. It’s all here in Ohio, folks. Come on up. My first collection of short stories (If the Heart is Lean) will be published by LSU Press in Fall 2008.

Mike Magnuson (MFA, 1997), <magnusmj@siu.edu>

continues to teach at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He’s had articles recently in Backpacker and Bicyclingand has articles forthcoming in those same publications and someothers. He has been working on a novel for several years and is almost to
the point where he doesn’t care if he finishes it. In his spare time, he races cyclocross for Team Surgeon, rows for the Southern Illinois Crew, and plays drums for Chief Red Bull and the Heckawee Nation. He also takes careof a second-hand cat named Scabs.

Randall Mann (MFA, 1997), <randallmann62@yahoo.com>

My second book of poems, Breakfast with Thom Gunn, is coming out from University of Chicago Press in Spring 2009. Last year the textbook I co-wrote, Writing Poems, Seventh Edition, was published by Pearson Longman. Recent poems appeared in Bloom, Literary
Imagination, Pleiades, Spork, Subtropics, and Western Humanities Review, and on Verse Daily. My essay on John Ashbery, “The Illusion of Intimacy,” was published on the Academy of American Poets website. I live in San Francisco, work for a biotech company, and do not blog.

Arthur McMaster (MFA 2004), <amcmaster@uscupstate.edu>

Sue and I laze about most of the Palmetto day, and now and again on a sultry summer night we can be found lazing. When we’re gonna do that we usually put the fan on. I suspect the nearby cows are chewing their cuds while we laze, but I’m not positive about that. And I’d prefer not to be called as a witness, or as a person of interest. I was once cleared to know about the special application of cow cuds to locating WMD, especially to the missing ones, but I’ve been debriefed. (You should pardon the expression). I do remember, however, that my book ( 4 years in the making!) is finally out. Yippee! My publisher is Orchard Park Press. The book is aptly called Musical Muse, Wives and Lovers of the Great Composers. I made up the title myself. Anyway, I would appreciate it if everyone reading this and everyone you know would buy a copy, and then we can have our own cow and I’ll look more carefully into her chewing habits. Oh, I also had a poem nominated or the Pushcart Prize last year, but if I won anything the darned neighbor cow must have chewed it. I’m still teaching writing and literature courses at Converse College, in Spartanburg SC. Go cows!

Shamrock McShane (MFA, 1987), <afn32221@bellsouth.net>

presents site-specific staging of The Odd Couple at the Eden Dinner Playhouse this spring and Glengarry Glen Ross at the Civic Media Center next fall. You Are Not Frank Sinatra is in post-production. The Votive Pit and It’s All Good are available from B-Side.

Preston Merchant (MFA, 1996), <merchant@speakeasy.net>

My travels photographing the global Indian diaspora have recently taken me to Kenya, Singapore, and Malaysia, with China and Barbados on the side. I’ve been a guest blogger for <www.sepiamutiny.com>, which is concerned with South Asian cultural issues, both serious and unserious, and has a large audience. The goal of all this is a book, which is a year or two away from completion. I accidentally left my Gators 2006 National Champions hat under the front seat of a taxi in Kuala Lumpur. <www.prestonmerchant.com>.

Molly Kugel Merkner (MFA, 2001) & Christopher Merkner (MFA, 2001)

Since our last note, we had a baby (Oliver) and we are expecting our second.

Sam Michel (MFA, 1991)

Sam Michel’s novel Big Dogs and Fly Boys came out in October from SMU, with high praise from George Saunders, Joy Williams, and Pat Conroy. He is still teaching in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Oindrila Mukherjee (MFA, 2004)

It’s been a pretty cool PhD year even with comps looming! I was lucky enough to win the $ 10,000 Diana P. Hobby award (formerly known as the Barthelme-Michener Fellowship) for the first chapter of my novel in progress, take a playwriting class with 3-time Pulitzer winner, Lanford Wilson, and continue a really fun job as a fiction editor at Gulf Coast which almost makes me feel more powerful than teaching undergrads. I also completed 5 years in the US of A which mean I get more tax benefits now.

I totally forgot the real news, and it’s relevant to the program. I had translated a few poems by the Bengali poet Joy Goswami (he’s probably one of the two most famous bengali poets living and writing now) for Sidney Wade’s translation workshop at UF during my MFA. This year, two of them were published as part of a book of his poems translated in English – Part Autobiography, edited by Goswami himself, published in India.

Christian Nagle (MFA, 1995) <xnagle@hotmail.com>

8th year in Japan: raw fish and hot springs’ll do it to you. Last year began publishing translations of the cult early Modernist poet, Chuya Nakahara.

Michael Newirth (MFA, 1995), <mnewirth@bridgemagazine.org>

I crossed paths with a number of Florida-connected writers in the past year. I read with my onetime student Kevin Moffett in Chicago, in celebration of his Iowa Short Fiction Award-winning collection, and raised a glass to Jeff Parker at the Myopic Fiction Series, where he read from his novel Ovenman. I introduced John Sheppard at Quimbys Bookstore where he read from his novel Small Town Punk, tested obscure Japanese medical devices with Christian Nagle in Brooklyn, and ate Lamb with Pure Cumin Powder Xin Jiang Style with Padgett Powell at Lao Sze Chaun in Chicago. I continue to teach composition and creative writing at the University of Illinois – Chicago, and to sporadically contribute book reviews to Time Out Chicago. My fiction will appear in forthcoming issues of Other Voices and Another Chicago Magazine, and I will be guest fiction editor of the next issue of Fifth Wednesday, a new literary journal based in Lisle, IL. For information on submissions or purchase, please visit <http://www.fifthwednesdayjournal.com>.

Martha Otis (MFA, 2000)

Since 2002 I’ve been teaching composition and creative writing down here at the University of Miami. For those of you who knew my daughter Serena, she’s now 10 and has starred the last couple years as Marie (Clara) in Miami City Ballet’s Balanchine version of The Nutcracker. When she started dancing, I did, too, but tango and salsa, not ballet. I regularly drive around with five or six pairs of heels in the trunk of the car, and even spent a month in Buenos Aires last summer polishing my technique. I recently helped get running, and started volunteering for, The Shimmy Club, a non_profit that teaches tango to visually impaired teens. This has been one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. Can anyone tell me if Ann Carson ever actually danced a tango? I’ve seen some alums down here but encourage more of you to come down, especially in November when we have a great book fair.

Padgett Powell

I was away to France last year, and did 37 days on the ground in Kenya before it was set on political fire. I published some oddments here and there. What may have been an intestinal virus from Africa laid me a tad low for months back in Bretagne and may have occasioned my seeing, and conversing with, and rather enjoying the company of, Jesus.

Benjamin Pryor (MFA, 2001)

Since the last newsletter poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Pataphysica, Oxford Magazine, MiPOesias Magazine, and Dark Sky Magazine. Work is forthcoming in Quarterly West and Subtropics.

Imad Rahman (MFA, 2001)

I live and teach, for the moment, at Kansas State U in Manhattan, KS. I am accompanied by my dog, Bubba. There is talk that I am working on something that, in a moment of generosity, can be called a novel. If you happen to find yourself at the upcoming AWP conference, look for me in the nearest bar. I will be there, but Bubba will not.

Jennifer Rapaport (MFA, 2000), <JenRap@rcn.com>

My short story “Fallout” appeared in Further Fenway Fiction (Rounder Books,
2007). Also new last summer, our third child, Owen Hayes Rapaport Goldstein.
Owen joins Zoe (age 8) and Maya (age 5). We are still living in Somerville,
MA, and would love to hear from old friends at Jenrap@rcn.com.

Mary Jane Ryals (MA candidate, 1984-85)

Mary Jane Ryals has a first collection of poetry, Moving Waters, forthcoming with Kitsune Books in March 2008. She lives in Tallahassee and teaches at Florida State in the Spring, and in Valencia, Spain, in the Summer.

Ralph Savarese (MFA, 1994)

After a long delay, my book Reasonable People: a Memoir of Autism and Adoption appeared from Other Press in May of 2007. Newsweek called it a “real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities.” My son and I have given readings all over the country – he with his talking computer – and we have appeared widely on radio and television. I just received tenure at Grinnell College, where I teach American literature, creative writing, and disability studies.

Gail Shepherd (MA, 1985)

Gail Shepherd is a food and features writer at Broward-Palm Beach New Times. This year she was named Best Restaurant Critic by the Association of Food Journalists, narrowly trouncing the food critic at the Washington Post (which occasioned much merrymaking down at the office). She was also nominated for a James Beard Award, and one of her essays is forthcoming in Best Food Writing 2007. She lives serenely in two Florida shacks with her partner of 7 years, a couple of red dogs, and a noisy gecko.

David Todd (MFA, 1993)

I’ve no witty contribution to the newsletter. Married, mortgaged, dad of boy (6), working too much for an advocacy nonprofit in Washington, D.C., a town where everybody works too much – and so, musing how to change that. Still writing, some, when I can, liking some of it. I’d offer this article for other alums’ interest, by Irish novelist Julian Gough. I loved it. He wants less tired angst, more comedy, in novels: <http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=9276>

Lauren Wilcox (MFA, 2001), <laurenwilcox@hotmail.com>

has upgraded to Lauren Puchowski as the result of a marriage. She is still Lauren Wilcox in some matters, like writing and art. She freelances for the Washington Post Magazine, writing features and travel stories, and for the Smithsonian Magazine and others. She has shown her metalwork in museum and gallery shows in Arkansas and New York.

Sidney Wade

Sidney Wade’s fifth collection of poems, Stroke, is out this January 2008 from Persea Books. She looks forward to the pasture after four years of service on the AWP board at the NYC conference, having served as President from 2006-2007 and Board Advisor from 2007-2008. On the other hand, she and Elena will emerge from the woods and become urban (Gainesville) animals in February 2008.

Suzanne Warren (MFA, 2004), <suzanneewarren@yahoo.com>

I’m in my fourth year of the PhD program in lit w creative diss at the University of Cincinnati. Fellow UF people here include Bryan Smith, Peter Grimes, Heather Hamilton, and Eric Bliman. It’s nice having the Florida train make a stop here. We talk about alligators when time permits.

In 2007, I was a writing fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ucross Foundation. My story “The Country of Husbands” got picked up by Gulf Coast.

Hope all’s well with all my Florida friends and acquaintances. Pat your dogs and cats for me.

Martin Wilson (MFA, 1998), <martinwils@aol.com>

I landed a two-novel contract with Delacorte Press/Random House Books for Young Readers. My first novel, called What They Always Tell Us, will be published in August 2008. I’m currently working on the second one. I’m still living in New York City, where I continue to work as a publicist for Vintage/Anchor Books.

Chad Woody (MFA, 2000) <FloppyCrow@aol.com>

–Survived ice storm of the century, January 2007
–Taught three sections of poetry writing, Missouri State University, spring/fall 2007
–Had artwork printed in Moon City Review, spring 2007
–Constructed backyard pergola w/ hammock, slate roofing, summer 2007
–Visited Josh Trotter in the “Die Hard” building at 20th Century Fox, Los Angeles, summer 2007
–Submitted comic book to Dark Horse, Image, and DC/Zuda: only one rejection so far!
–Invented card game titled “Deluxe Shitsville”, January 2008 (wife demands that I copyright before release)
–Have poems forthcoming in “A Cadence of Hooves” anthology & “The Human Tentacle” journal
–Completed third year of marriage with favorable reviews

C. Dale Young (MFA, 1993)

My second book of poetry, The Second Person, was published by Four Way Books in Spring of 2007. I spent some time at Yaddo in the Fall of 2007 working on a new ms. of poems and hope, if all goes well, to have it completed within a few years. I continue to practice medicine full-time, to edit poetry for New England Review, and I am in my fourth year teaching in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. My poem, “Sepsis,” which originally appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, will appear in the 2008 edition of Best American Poetry.

Suzanne Zweizig (MFA, 2003)

This year I had poems published in Beloit Poetry Journal and forthcoming in Subtropics. I’ve also been awarded a residency to the MacDowell Colony for this spring (2008)! In between all of this, I’ve become a purple belt in karate, made my debut on the electric bass at DC’s infamous Zoo Bar, and had another bike accident, which claimed a couple of teeth. I live in Washington DC where I work for a nonprofit conservation group, Conservation International. Sometimes they send me to cool places like Costa Rica and Brazil, but I am still going to quit soon. I’m enjoying DC a lot and sometimes watch Tarheel basketball with fellow MFA@FLA-er John Elderkin and catch poetry readings with fellow-poet Julie Green. If anybody else is in the area or traveling through, please get in touch!

MFA@FLA: Creative Writing