MFA@FLA Newsletter, Spring 2013

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.

Headnote

The best weather assessment for MFA@FLA I can come up with right now, and I hope I am not leaving any books out, but may be, of course, is this list of books being published more or less as I type this list of the newest (2013 and forthcoming) books by people out of here, to redundant up in the phrasing a bit to make my point about the newest books out of here by our people:

Deborah Ager, Bill Beverly & John Poch, Old Flame: From the First Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine, WordFarm
Michael W. Cox, Against the Hidden River, MAMMOTH
Travis Fristoe & Aaron Cometbus, Radon, Libros Retroactiv
Noelle Kocot, Soul in Space, Wave Books
Daniel Levine, Hyde, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Randall Mann, Straight Razor, Persea Books
Christopher Merkner, The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic, Coffee House Press
Christina Nichol, Waiting for the Electricity, Overlook
Rhonda Riley, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, Ecco
Alexandra Teague, The Wise and Foolish Builders, Persea Books
Aaron Thier, The Ghost Apple, Bloomsbury

The weather, then, is good. Even the climate is sound.

Allen Jih, MFA 2006 in poetry, is practicing poetry of the body as he seeks a position with Cirque du Soleil. He put in an appearance recently on America’s Got Talent: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8nly1s8e1k.

It occurs to me that the program needs a mascot, and I am putting Mr. Jih up for the role until he objects or others tender a better nomination. Thus the MFA@FLA official mascot search has commenced.

Testimonials

Sheri Allen (MFA, 2005),
My area was poetry but my thesis was multi-genre, including fiction, creative nonfiction, and translations.

Now finishing my last year of Ph.D. at the University of Cincinnati. Creative Dissertation is a collection of original poetry titled American Alefbeit, narrative poems about one family’s contemporary diaspora organized around a series of poems about the Hebrew letters. Am shopping the ms. around to first book competitions. One fifth of the collection comes from my MFA thesis, but ALL of my post-2004 journal publications (so far) have been from the work I did at UF!!!! My most recent journal pub. (from my MFA thesis, originally composed in William’s class) is in the current issue of The Tampa Review. Another one of my UF poems, (composed in Michael’s workshop) got me into 2010 Best New Poets. And a recently revised version of a prose piece from my UF thesis will appear in the Feb. 2013 online Journal of Compressed Creative Arts. Translations I worked on while in Sidney’s translation workshop have been the basis for years of academic research up here at U of C that spawned several conference presentations at major conferences including AWP and MMLA, and two academic journal articles now under consideration at PMLA and Religion & Literature. I feel very grateful and lucky I got to do so much while I was in Gainesville! And do I ever miss the place…all the time!

Jay Atkinson (MFA, 1982)
My seventh book, Memoirs of a Rugby Playing Man (Thomas Dunne Books, 2012) includes several ribald chapters set in Gainesville during my time playing on the Gators championship rugby side in the early 80s. I also had the opportunity to tell a number of my favorite “Harry Crews stories,” like my first evening of the graduate fiction workshop when Harry challenged me to a fist fight in class, and another night when I had a gun put to my head outside a bar called Lillian’s Music Store when I rushed to his defense. Ah, the heretofore undocumented benefits of a liberal arts education!

I have a new literary agent, Anthony Mattero of Foundry Literary + Media, who is currently taking my new collection of literary fiction, and a proposal for another narrative nonfiction book, out to the rapidly changing publishing marketplace. I teach writing at Boston University and fellow Gators can reach me there at jaya@bu.edu.

Paulette Guerin Bane (MFA, 2015)
Paulette Guerin Bane received her BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and her M.A. in English Literature from the University of Central Arkansas, graduating summa cum laude from both institutions. Her undergraduate thesis, a collection of poems entitled Traces, won the June Martin and Walter Rudd Honors Thesis Award for the Humanities. While at UCA she taught courses in World Literature, Drama, and Poetry and advised students in the College of Liberal Arts. She has also led UCA study abroad trips to Italy and France. She is now an MFA candidate at the University of Florida. Her poetry has appeared in delta, SLANT, Cantos, and Euphony journal online. Her chapbook, Polishing Silver, was published by Finishing Line Press in November 2011.

Rebecca Bauman (MFA, 2013)
In 2012, my poem “The Dwarf Hamster” was featured in the annual University of Virginia Press’ “Best New Poets” anthology. That same year, I received the Calvin A. VanderWerf Award for excellence in teaching from the University of Florida. Come 2013, I got myself hired at Flagler College in the nation’s Oldest City; I’ll be teaching writing sorts of things and, in return, will receive a parking pass to a downtown lot near one of those creepy cemeteries the tourists are so fond of. To make money on the side, I’ll continue to produce small fee lance articles about the sleeping habits of freshwater crabs and how to sew diapers for your parrot.

Elizabeth Bevilacqua (MFA, 2013)
Elizabeth Bevilacqua’s short story “A Tessellation” was published in BODEGA, Issue 3, November 2012.

Diana Smith Bolton (MFA, 2009) <DianaSmithBolton@gmail.com>
2012 was a great year. I founded DISTRICT, an online journal of writing and art (DistrictLit.com) with fellow MFAer Diya Chaudhuri. I placed poems in an anthology from Imagination & Place Press, Magic Lantern Review, NARROW FELLOW, and Noctua Review. Also, I got married and moved to Arlington, Virginia.

Bredt Bredthauern, (MFA, 2012) <bredthauer@gmail.com>
I live on my bicycle. I left Texas almost one year ago. I was in London for the Olympics and Italy for the papal conclave. I am currently in Turkey riding across the Black Sea Coast drinking mass amounts of ayran and ay. I am riding east toward Iran. I have no money. I have no job. Life is good.

Karen Britten (MFA, 2015) <karenlbritten@ufl.edu>
Karen received the 2012 Tuscany Press Prize for Catholic Fiction.

Geoffrey Brock (MFA, 1998)
My big fat anthology (The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry), after haunting my dreams for years, finally appeared in the flesh in 2012 and was hailed as a heck of a good book by publications including The Nation and Bookslut. My second collection of my own stuff, long delayed by the aforementioned collection of other people’s stuff, is now making its way into publishers’ hands, and newish poems will soon be appearing in the pages of such journals as Poetry, The Paris Review, and (best of all) Subtropics. On the home front, our eight-year-old son’s favorite band is The Clash, a fact that fills me with pride and fear, and our five-year-old daughter’s current favorite book is the The Hobbit, though she wants to know why there aren’t more good female characters. Parenthood, in short, is getting interesting.

Kevin Canty (MFA, 1990) <kevincanty@gmail.com>
I seem to have skipped a couple of years. My novel Everything came out in summer 2010 and met with critical respect and commercial disaster. My daughter Nora is a sophomore at Willamette University and my son Turner (born in Gainesville while I was in the program) recently published his first poem in Fence magazine. He’s living in California, working for Omnidawn, a publisher, and playing music.

I was on sabbatical last year, spending most of the late winter and spring in Tucson. I got a ton of writing done without actually managing to finish anything. Padgett came to fish for a few weeks this summer, caught a few trout and one rattlesnake, which he made into rattlesnake gumbo in my kitchen.

David Caplan (MFA, 1993)
I spent the fall semester as Fulbright Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liège (Belgium) and gave talks in Ireland, Germany, and Belgium. In the summer I went to Israel to give a reading and conduct a series of workshops for Bar Ilan University. The Virginia Quarterly awarded me the 2012 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry for my sequence, “Observances,” which it published in the spring issue. Other poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, 32 Poems, and At Length. Also, this year Oxford University Press will publish my scholarly book, Rhyme’s Challenge.

Leah Carroll (MFA, 2007)
Since graduating I’ve published non-fiction in the New York Times, TheAtlantic.com, Interview.com and a few other places. In 2011 I received a NYFA grant to work on my book, which remains unfinished. I work at a hedge fund and it’s really great. I live in Brooklyn with my boyfriend and Chewy.

Diya Chaudhuri (MFA, 2011) <diya.chaudhuri@gmail.com>
I’m still PhDing in Atlanta. I started a journal (districtlit.com) with fellow MFA-FLAer Diana Smith Bolton last year, and will be the production editor at New South next year. Poems out recently in Sycamore Review and Smartish Pace.

Today, while I was holding a conference with a student, one of my officemates came in, carefully placed a box marked “Careful — Bernard’s inside!!!” on the desk, and left without saying anything. It was an injured pigeon. Since leaving MFA@FLA, I have once been alone in an office with a wounded pigeon.

Michael W. Cox (MFA, 1988) <mwcox@pitt.edu>
Have just had a short story collection called Against the Hidden River (2013) published by MAMMOTH books (contact: info@mammothbooks.org). Received tenure last year at U. of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. At work on a novel.

James Davis (MFA, 2011), <thejamesdavis@gmail.com>
Shortly after graduating in May 2011, I moved to Denver, where I found a position as a Marketing Consultant for Chipotle Mexican Grill. The title is a euphemism. I write emails in response to the comments submitted to Chipotle’s website by customers. It turns out a large chunk of the American population believes “guacamole” is spelled with an initial Q. One customer referred to it as “the green cream stuff.” People really want us to serve queso. I am given a $75 burrito stipend every month in addition to my salary.

Since I left the program, my poems have been published in Best New Poets 2011, Copper Nickel, Gargoyle, and 32 Poems. My friend Hugh Lobel, a doctoral candidate in music composition at CU Boulder, set four of my poems to music. The piece was performed live at the University’s Black Box Theatre in March 2012.

In my downtime, I have competed in several Scrabble tournaments and spelling bees. My total winnings, in cash and bar tabs, come to around $300.

Andrew Donovan (MFA, 2013) <a.thomas.donovan@gmail.com>
My poem, “Ithaca (No Suitors),” is forthcoming in The New Republic (sometime in the next year). This is a poem that has been ‘shopped by my gracious friends (and edited by our esteemed faculty) at MFA@FLA. The publication resulted from following up on positive feedback after the weekend of visiting editors. Many thanks to everyone!

Claire Eder (MFA, 2013)
Beyond the usual bureaucracy-/self-induced paranoia I have no reason to suspect that I will not graduate from UF and continue with a PhD in creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, OH, where I will live on a cold hill next to a graveyard of which there is no google street view, so I don’t yet know how creepy or not creepy it will be. I want to get a cat. I got poems accepted at The Cincinnati Review and Sakura Review, and a translation of French poet Marie-Claire Bancquart is forthcoming from Guernica.

Rebecca Evanhoe (MFA, 2013), <revanhoe@gmail.com>
In the past year, my non-fiction piece “Approximately 36 Toilets” appeared in Gulf Coast. (Sidney Wade had poems in the same issue!) In March, I gave a reading in Houston for the Poison Pen Reading Series. I also judged my first fiction contest for the University of Kansas’ English department, which was somehow much more fun than grading. I graduate from MFA@FLA this year, and will stay in Gainesville to work for Shadow Health, a local company that makes virtual patients to train nurses.

Mary Beth Ferda (MFA, 2009), <mbethferda@gmail.com>
With heavy hearts, we left Gainesville in August. Daniel accepted a position as Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Marshall University in Huntington, WV, and I’m opening a massage therapy practice at a yoga studio that’s within walking distance of our house. We live across the street from Eric Smith! In December, I served as Best Beth in Eric and Laura’s wedding, a mini MFA@FLA reunion. We threw a good bachelor party with the help of Chris Shannon on loan from New York. I’ve contributed a little essay to The Palm Beach Effect, an anthology of reflections on Michael Hofmann’s work. Poems appeared this year in Green Mountains Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, FENCE, NANO Fiction, and online at Blue Mesa Review.

Travis Fristoe (MFA, 2014), <t.fristoe@ufl.edu>
Co-authored a book (with Aaron Cometbus), Radon, this year about 90s Gainesville punk band Radon. And am teaching graphic novels at the Sequential Artists Workshop.

Lawrence Hetrick (BA, 1962, Faculty, 1966-86)
Lawrence Hetrick published Derelict Tributaries, a book of poems, with Anhinga Press in January, 2012. The book is illustrated with prints by Michael Kemp, which, like the poems, reflect an engagement with the natural world of Northern Florida. Hetrick has poems recently appearing in Valley Voices, Alabama Literary Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Christendom Review. He resides in Atlanta, Georgia, and continues his writing and painting.

Ric Hoeben (MFA, 2007), <ric.hoeben@gmail.com>
Ric Hoeben now lives in Pawleys Island, South Carolina. He ascribes to Harry’s slogan: “Teaching, real teaching, is — or ought to be — a messy business.” His most recent fiction has been found in Tampa Review, storySouth, Glimmer Train, Clapboard House, The Monarch Review, Spork, Atticus Review, Hobart, Connotation Press, Burrow Press Review, Pithead Chapel, Umbrella Factory, and Waccamaw. He’d like to see his story collection, Sandlappers, out sooner before later….

Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann’s Joseph Roth translations–the Letters, the Radetzky March, and The Emperor’s Tomb–were republished by Granta in London at the beginning of the year. Several others are slated to follow. Penguin published a Wassermann translation of his (My First Wife) and another Fallada (A Small Circus, with electrifying Heartfield cover); a further Fallada, Stories from the Underworld, will appear around the turn of the year. His Gottfried Benn translations–Impromptus: Selected Poems and Some Prose–are due from Farrar, Straus in November.

Andre Naffis-Sahely and Julian Stannard brought out a book about me (sic), called The Palm Beach Effect, including handsome/ arrant/ endearing perjuries by various UF-ites. Since then I’ve felt rather posthumous, and indeed have been asked whether I’m still alive or not.

Sabrina Jaszi (MFA, 2013)
I’m off to D.C. to live in a house with more cats than is wise. A story was printed this year in the New Ohio Review.

Rachel Khong (MFA, 2011), <rachel.khong@gmail.com>
I’m still living in San Francisco, still working on Lucky Peach magazine, still editing cookbooks for McSweeney’s. This year I traveled to Mexico and Spain, and now I’m learning Spanish (or trying, anyway). No tengo hijos, mascotas, coches, o dinero. Pero est todo bien.

Noelle Kocot (MFA, 1995)
My sixth book of poetry, Soul in Space, will be out from Wave Books this October. My work is also being included in The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and Best American Poetry 2013, for the third time in the Best American Poetry series, as well as other anthologies in the U.S. and around the world. I have also received a Lannan Literary Fellowship a couple of months ago. I live in the armpit of New Jersey, and I love it here. I teach writing in New York and online.

Victoria Lancelotta (MFA, 1994)
good lord, has it been that long? since last we spoke, I’ve managed to keep out of trouble and get into Best American Short Stories, and lose my agent but win an NEA. Is that pretty much a wash? we moved kicking and screaming from Nashville back to Baltimore, where I spend a whole lot of time taking care of my elderly parents and my husband spends a whole lot of time being a full-on rock star of patience and decency. I write when I can manage to uncross my eyes.

David Leavitt
The Two Hotel Francforts, the novel I have been working on these last years, will be published by Bloomsbury in October.

23 Great Stories, an anthology I co-edited with Aaron Thier (MFA 2012), will be coming out from Signet in August.

Our beloved wire fox terrier, Tolo, whom many of you knew, died last year at fifteen. We now have a Bedlington terrier puppy whose name is Toby. Depending on the day he resembles a lamb, a seal, or an alien.

Wylie Lenz (MFA, 2007)
I stuck around the UF English Department after finishing my MFA and eventually earned a PhD in 2013 for writing a dissertation about cultural representations of the railroad tramp. In the meantime, Stephanie Boluk and I collaboratively edited a book called Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, which McFarland brought out in 2011. Steph and I also co-wrote an article about early modern plague narratives (Jonson, Defoe) and contemporary zombie films (Boyle, Wright), which appeared in the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. Of course, these endeavors are of the academic variety and thus their writing cannot and should not be considered a creative act. Please accept my apologies for sullying the rarefied pages of this newsletter.

William Logan <wlogan@ufl.edu>
Madame X (Penguin), a new book of poems, was published in the fall, a few months after my edition of John Townsend Trowbridge’s forgotten comic poem Guy Vernon (University of Minnesota). I’ve had poems in Boulevard, Hopkins Review, Little Star, New Criterion, Poetry, Notre Dame Review, Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. In criticism, I published essays on Philip Larkin’s Complete Poems in Poetry, on “The Unbearable Lightness of Criticism” in the New Criterion, and on Elizabeth Bishop’s teenage years and her first love, titled “Elizabeth Bishop at Summer Camp,” in Virginia Quarterly Review, as well as a very short memoir, “Meeting Mr. Hill,” in Poetry. The usual spring and fall poetry chronicles appeared in the New Criterion. I read at Mary Washington University and the University of Alabama, Birmingham, and this summer I’ll be on the faculty at the West Chester Poetry Conference.

Margaret Mackinnon (MFA, 1991)
I am living in Falls Church, VA, with my husband Bob and daughter Hannah. My book, The Invented Child, received the 2011 Gerald Cable Book Award and was published by Silverfish Review Press in February of this year. Library Journal recently listed it among “Thirty Essential Poetry Titles for Spring 2013” (and no one should doubt the advice of a librarian). I also received the 2012 Graybeal-Gowen Poetry Award from Shenandoah and Washington and Lee University, and was featured as the Artist of the Month by Image (online) in August 2012. I can attest to the fact that patience is a virtue.

Randall Mann (MFA, 1997)
My third collection of poems, Straight Razor, is forthcoming from Persea Books on the Fall 2013/Winter 2014 list. I recently published poems in Poetry, Salmagundi, The Cincinnati Review, Court Green, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series, and a few anthologies including 250 Poems: A Portable Anthology, Third Edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s). I published essays in the anthologies The Yellow of Unlove: Reflections on Michael Hofmann (CB Editions) and Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners(University of Wisconsin). I also participated in a panel at the Academy of American Poets’ Forum called “Poetry in Age of Social Media.” And I recently spent three months on a secondment in Basel, where the only German word I learned was quittung.

Emily Miller (MFA, 2002)
My first novel, Brand New Human Being, was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June. The paperback will be out in May. I attended the Sewanee Writers’ Conference this summer, where I had the pleasure of catching up with Sidney Wade. I’m writing this update from Yaddo, where I’m at work on another novel. Both books are expansions of stories I wrote in good old FLA.

Chris Nagle (MFA, 1995)
After completing his PhD at Houston in 2000, Christian Nagle spent eleven years writing, translating and teaching in Japan.

He returned Stateside in 2011 to found a consulting company, Nuance Partners, and co-found a filmmaking group, Empath Media, which is already winning awards for its commercial work. He has been publishing in places like Esquire, Raritan, AGNI, and the Boston Review, and has two books forthcoming — Goat Songs, a translation of the first book of poems by Japanese early modernist Chuya Nakahara (1907-1937), and his own first collection of poems, Flightbook. His first feature-length film is now in pre-production.

Hai-Dang Phan (MFA, 2013)
Since August I have been occupying an apartment on High Street in the town of Grinnell, Iowa, where I walk two frighteningly short blocks to the college where I now teach, and consequently am completing my third thesis year long distance. My de facto low res MFA@FLA. I hardly recommend it. Poems–the lucky ones–have found homes in journals such as Barrow Street, Diagram, District, Drunken Boat, Everyday Genius, Lana Turner, and NO Journal. Translations have been published in Anomalous, Asymptote, Cerise Press, and RHINO, and were awarded a fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association. I am also newly and happily married! But that, sadly, is long distance as well. Overall, more highs than lows.

John Poch (MFA, 1997)
John Poch has recently published poems in Yale Review, New England Review, Poetry, and Agni, among other journals. In Spring 2014 he will be a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Barcelona where he will teach modern and contemporary American Poetry. Old Flame, From the First Ten Years of 32 Poems Magazine, co-edited with Bill Beverly and Deborah Ager, also UF alums, was published in 2012 by WordFarm Press.

Padgett Powell
I was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in fiction in Scotland. I did not know what it was until my mentor in college told me it was second to the Nobel in her view and they gave me ten thousand pounds Sterling in Edinburgh and bought five thousand copies of You & I to give to the freshman of the University of Edinburgh. Then the American version, You & Me, came out. You & I is “too formal” for the American audience.

Magdalen Powers (MFA, 2008) <magdalenpowers@gmail.com>
Have added a cat to my aforementioned densely plant-surrounded house. There’s another one that comes to the porch in hope of entry. I’d acquiesce, but Alpha Cat just hisses and spits. Have ID’d the grapes on the arbor, but still lost them to the birds, for the second year running. Lost my singing voice, too, in late 2011, and it hasn’t come back since. This isn’t as distressing as it should be, as it gets me out of various musical obligations I’d honestly much rather avoid. Published some poems, both in the fine online journal Unshod Quills and on some orange silt fencing along a new light-rail line stretching south from Portland, Ore. (The latter will also be stamped into a sidewalk somewhere as well.) Thumbed my nose at the Fancy-Pants U. job, but am still enjoying teaching at Chemeketa Community College, a position I have held now longer than I’ve held any other. Watched Col. Powell claim his rightful place as heir of some sort to Powell’s City of Books, and taught Adam Vines’s The Coal Life to my intro poetry students, who suddenly started speaking all the time, even the quiet ones. Quiet is what life has been lately, but don’t those things always change.

Rhonda Riley (MFA, 1992) <rriley56@yahoo.com>
After getting my MFA, I stayed in Gainesville, completely distracted by family and working as staff at UF. Then in 2000 I got divorced. Instead of being a good girl and spending my marital dissolution funds on a new house for myself and the kids, I rented and I bought myself a year’s sabbatical to write the first draft of a novel. After a year I went back to work and the novel went in a file cabinet along with some crappy stories. UF was kind enough to lay me off a few years ago and I took the novel out again. Ecco will publish, The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope, at the end of this month (April 2013). I’ve had an amazingly smooth ride with the publication process so far. I am endlessly distractable but hope to have a second novel finished in the next year.

Ralph Savarese (MFA, 1994) <savarese@grinnell.edu>
Having won a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Mellon Humanities Writ Large Fellowship, I’m spending the academic year 2012-2013 at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences as part of its neurohumanities research group. Recent creative publications include nonfiction pieces in Fourth Genre and Ploughshares and a long poem in Seneca Review. I have an essay-tribute to Michael Hofmann, entitled “The Exile of Not Exactly,” that will appear in a forthcoming book about Michael’s work and another nonfiction essay, “I Might Be Famous,” that will appear in a collection about memoir writing from the University of Nebraska Press. I continue to direct the Writers@Grinnell reading series at Grinnell where I teach.

John Sheppard (MFA, 1994)
My new novel, Alpha Mike Foxtrot, was released by Paragraph Line Books at the end of 2012.

Meg Shevenock (MFA, 2006)
I live in Pittsburgh above the beauty parlor and beside the Rock n’ Bowl, whose neon sign lights up my room at night. I’ve been privately teaching four profoundly-gifted, super inspiring children for the past few years, and it’s the best job I’ve ever had. My students love Elizabeth Bishop, Lewis Hyde, black holes, binomial nomenclature, tromping through the woods Thoreau-style, and so on. Bliss topics. We venture on many field trips such as behind-the-scenes at the Mollusk Department at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where, in such case, we got to see a tiny snail’s heartbeat in ordinary lamplight. In short, I’m getting to have my second life as an amateur scientist, in addition to teaching the poem/art things. It is good, lucky work.

My poems have appeared various places, most recently Denver Quarterly, Fence and Jubilat; one of my manuscripts was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, 2012 and I’m working on a second manuscript entitled Hell Sampler.

For several years I’ve been engaged in a series of telepathic works with the artist Jamie Boyle. Our collaborations have appeared in galleries such as Art in the Age (Philadelphia) and Urban Arts Space (Columbus) and we have recently been commissioned to do a telepathic book cover (in progress!). I also drew the cover for the poet Robin Clarke, whose stunning book Lines the Quarry is forthcoming from Omnidawn.

Finally, I was honored to be a featured writer in Ann Hamilton’s miraculous, “The Event of a Thread,” at the Park Avenue Armory this past winter. Ann Hamilton is indescribably the best.

I think I got in all my shout-outs. Generally, I feel I have been off the map of this place. I miss people.

Walter Smelt (MFA, 2015)
Walter Smelt had two poems accepted for the fall issue of Poetry East.

B. R. Smith (MFA, 2004)<smbr@ucmail.uc.edu>
Last few year’s successes all on domestic fronts and related to reproduction. Have had stories in Ninth Letter, Mississippi Review, Fence, Witness, and a few others. Shot a rifle at my grandmother’s funeral in Bryant, Arkansas. My second daughter was born this year; we named her Lucinda. Am upping my racquetball game after having taken a year’s break from the sport following the retreat of one P. Grimes (MFA, ’03) to N. Dakota. This week I’ve been doing a great deal of home car repair. I don’t lose at racquetball often and am wondering if this isn’t actually a worse thing, the point being that I am maybe learning less by not losing when the point is to get better. I’m at work on a book about disease control in the early 20th century that I aim to finish before the girls are preteen.

Eric Smith (MFA, 2009)<ericsmith23@gmail.com>
I still live in Huntington, WV and teach at Marshall University. They offered me a tenure-track spot in creative writing starting Fall 2013, and I took it. We somehow suckered MFA@FLAers Mary Beth Ferda and Daniel O’Malley to move here. They live across 11th from us, which is real nice. Poems appeared in or landed at Indiana Review, Smartish Pace, and Southwest Review. I’m still editing cellpoems (which you can sign up for here: http://www.cellpoems.org/subscribe/ ). The book was a finalist or semi-finalist for the Brittingham/Pollak, Crab Orchard Open competition, and National Poetry Series prizes. Laura and I got married in December. Feel free to come see us whenever.

Emma Smith-Stevens (MFA, 2013)
I’ve recently had stories published in Web Conjunctions and PANK, and new ones are forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Wigleaf, and Subtropics. This May marks the end of my three years MFA@FLA, but I will be staying in Gainesville for two more. The fried pickle consumption will continue, as will the novel-writing. I have yet to attend a football game, so I’ve penciled that in.

I occasionally post things here: satellitesoflove.tumblr.com

Jennifer Phifer Strange (MFA, 2001)<strangejkp@gmail.com>
The last year saw three of my poems in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume IV: Louisiana, three essays at the Art House America blog (arthouseamerica.com/blog), and one poem in The Other Journal. Also a fair amount of book editing for a couple of small presses. Meanwhile, our boys are 6 in kindergarten, featuring Legos and sight words, and 3 going on 12. Our freezers are full of soups and stews.

Alexandra Teague (MFA, 1998)<ateague@uidaho.edu>
I got the good news this February that my second book of poetry, The Wise and Foolish Builders, will be coming out from Persea in spring 2015. Poems from this manuscript have recently appeared or are forthcoming in ZYZZYVA, Gulf Coast, Willow Springs, 32 Poems, The Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. I continue to happily be Assistant Professor of Poetry at University of Idaho, where I am also faculty advisor for Fugue.

Adam Vines (MFA, 2006)<abvines@uab.edu>
In 2012, The Coal Life, my collection of poems, came out from U of Arkansas P, and I was included in Poets and Writers’ annual debut poets feature in the January 2013 issue. I had poems published in Poetry, Post Road, The Literary Review, Verse Daily, and A Face to Meet the Faces: an Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry, among others. In addition, I read or lectured at over a dozen universities and literary festivals last year. I am still teaching at UAB, but my position changed from a non-tenure-earning assistant professorship to a tenure-earning position. The Alabama State Council on the Arts awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship to me this year. Birmingham Poetry Review, the journal I edit, had its 25th anniversary this year, and I hosted an intimate celebration in a fancy private suite at AWP Boston. Badass poets who have published over the years in BPR read, and at the event I had cheap beer, whisky, box wine, goat chaps, Slim Jims, chainmail, marbles, ground squirrels, and Fiona Apple masks. I am still recovering.

Sidney Wade
Sidney Wade’s newest collection of poems, “Straits & Narrows,” will be published by Persea Books this spring (2013). She’ll be teaching again this summer in the Gettysburg Review’s Summer Conference for Writers and will give a reading at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, where she taught last year. She will also be teaching a 10-day program in Southern France–come travel, eat, savor wine, and write poetry with us! Oh, and she is pleased to report that she has 308 birds on her life list.

Suzanne Warren (MFA, 2004)
Hail, MFA @ FLA! I earned a PhD from the University of Cincinnati in 2011 and am in my second year of teaching creative writing and English at the University of Puget Sound, WA. I live in Seattle and enjoy views of sailboats, mountains, and copulating seagulls. Occasionally the sun shines. My essay on Edith Pearlman appeared in The Cincinnati Review 9:2 and Versal nominated my short short “The Reindeer Daughter” for a Pushcart. Onward.

Richard K. Weems (MFA, 1993)
I started myself a summer high school writing program up in the NE corner of New Jersey. The fascinatingly original name is the BCA Summer Writing Program. In short, I have started a writing program here among the culinary and engineering nerds of a technical school. Stories of mine have appeared of late in Frederick Barthelme’s New World Writing and Pif Magazine. I have also published a series of short, cheap e-books, also fascinatingly titled the Cheap Stories series. Short e-books, cheap as all hell.

Charles Wuest (MFA, 2002) <charles.wuest@gmail.com>
I’m in Dallas at SMU writing a dissertation on Chaucer and Boethius. Prosimetrum times. Some of my poems will appear soon inSubtropics and Southword. To supplement the income, I’ve been living with about 200 people, aged 18-19, as an academic presence. It has been edifying, but I’m going to move out in a year or so.

C. Dale Young (MFA, 1993)
My third book of poetry, Torn, was published by Four Way Books in 2011. In spring of 2012, I was awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. And in Fall of 2012, I was awarded a Residency Fellowship to MacDowell and a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to spend a month in 2013 at the Villa Serbelloni/Bellagio Centre on Lake Como to work on my fourth book of poetry. I continue to practice medicine full-time, edit poetry for the New England Review, and to teach in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Diane Zinna (MFA, 1998) <dianeyzp@hotmail.com>>
Since October 2011, I have been the membership director for AWP, the Association of Writers & Writing Programs. I had a chance to meet many of you at our Boston conference, where I could be seen toting my eight-month-old baby, Sarah, around the bookfair. I live just outside of Washington, DC with my singer/songwriter husband, Blair, and I recently got representation for my novel after years of trying.

MFA@FLA: Creative Writing