May 2012

Our annual Alumni Updates!  Every May we reach out to our Alumni to find out about their latest publications.  Enjoy!

Teresa Bonham ('03 Poetry) is a tenured professor of English at Oxnard College and her first book, The Case of the Shadow is going to be released in the fall.

Lily Brown (’07 Poetry) was published in the Boston Review 2012 National Poetry Month Feature.  She was the recipient of the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Sally Delehant’s (’09 Poetry) first book of poetry, A Real Time of It, will be published by the Cultural Society this summer.

Paul Ebenkamp ('09 Poetry) wrote and directed "You Have To Take Care Of My Work Together" for Small Press Traffic's Poets Theater, January 2012; has published poems in the past year in Try! and Mrs. Maybe; is co-editor of Early Women Modernists, forthcoming from Counterpoint Press, April 2013; co-hosts the Woolsey Heights reading series at his home in Berkeley; and recently joined Saint Mary's staff as Program Coordinator for the January Term.  

 Andrew Demcak (’97 Poetry) has recently published poems at Spork Press and published an interview at Literary Magpie. His poetry collection Night Chant (Lethe Press), was reviewed by Steve Fellner at Pansy Poetics.

Jenny Drai (’06 Poetry) was finalist in the Sawtooth Prize from Ahsahta Press and a semifinalist in the First/Second Book Prize from Omnidawn.  Recently, my poetry has appeared in Aesthetix, Cutlass, and Parthenon West Review.

Michael Gardner (’05 Creative Nonfiction) is the writer and contributor to a lifestyle and cook book, The Tables of May and Axel Vervoordt: A Guide to Entertaining and Seasonal Recipes published by   Flammarion in Paris, which  will be published in France, Belgium, Holland, Germany, Italy and the U.S this September.

 Janet Hardy’s (’08 Creative Nonfiction) Girlfag: A Life Told In Sex and Musicals is coming out in September from Beyond Binary Books. www.girlfagthebook.com.

Alisa Heinzman ('10 Poetry) received an MFA in Poetry from Saint Mary's College of California and a BA in English and French from the University of Nebraska. She co-publishes the chapbook journal Calaveras with Sara Mumolo and is an Editor for Octopus Books. She currently lives in Chicago where she works for a translation company.

Allison Landa (’06 Fiction) was a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE.  She had stories published in Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Prick of the Spindle, and Swill Magazine. I'll be reading at Why There are Words, a Sausalito reading series, on June 14.

Brett Fletcher Lauer (’07 Poetry) is the managing director of the Poetry Society of America and the poetry editor at A Public Space. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Harper’s, jubilat, Tin House and elsewhere. His first book of poems, A Hotel in Belgium, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2014.

 Jennifer Jean ( ’01 Poetry) is the author of The Archivist, a poetry chapbook published by Big Table Publishing Co. in November 2011.  She is a committee member and organizer of the 4^th Annual Massachusetts Poetry Festival that occurred in April, 2012.  She is a feature writer for Art Throb magazine and is a adjunct Professor at Salem State University.

Angela Hume Lewandowski (’08 Poetry) was a semifinalist for the 2012 Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Recently she saw the publication of her article "(Rescuing) Hegel's Magical Thinking" in the inaugural issue of the journal Eventual Aesthetics and her piece "Imagining Ecopoetics: An Interview with Robert Hass, Brenda Hillman, Evelyn Reilly, and Jonathan Skinner" is forthcoming in the journal /ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment/. Currently she is working to organize the 2013 Conference on Ecopoetics (Feb. 22-24, Berkeley, CA)

Rashaan A. Meneses (’06 Fiction) is an adjunct faculty member in Liberal & Civic Studies Program at Saint Mary's College.  She was nominated for a Sundress Best of the Net Prize. Her essay "Barbie’s Gotta Work” was published by Doveglion Press. Her short story “Hummingbird in Hand" was published in 8^th issue of Kurungabaa.

Rusty Morrison’s (‘99 Poetry) After Urgency (Tupelo) received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly.  Her essay Poetry and Gravity was recently published in Kenyon Review's print issue, and in her recent interview for Kenyon Review she discussed her time in the Saint Mary’s MFA Program.  Morrison is the Co-Publisher of Omnidawn.

Gabrielle Myers’ (’09 Poetry) essay “'Spread Like a Veil on a Rock’: Septimus and the Trench Poets of World War I” appeared in English, a journal published by Oxford University Press in the Fall 2011.  Her poem“Quality Control,” appeared in San Francisco Public Press in the Spring of 2011. In Nebo's Winter 2012 edition, the poem "On Ayako Iino’s ‘Pa Amb Tomàquet’" was published.

Risa Nye (’11 Creative Nonfiction) is a contributing writer for Hippocampus Magazine and writes articles on the craft of nonfiction. Her essays are recently published in Skirt! Magazine, You and Me Magazine, and Caught in the Carousel.

 Kaya Oakes' (’97 Poetry) memoir, Radical Reinvention, is forthcoming from Counterpoint Press. Her previous books are Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and Telegraph. She teaches composition, research, narrative journalism and creative nonfiction at UC Berkeley. 

April 2012

• Lily Brown of Athens, GA (and St Mary's MFA Program!) is the winner of the Poetry Society of America Cecil Hemley Memorial Award in 2012.
• Rusty Morrison had an appear essay in the Kenyon Review 

• Check out Barbie’s Gotta Work by Rashaan Alexis Meneses

Feburary 2012

• Rosa Del Duca's music and tour information at http://rosadelduca.bandcamp.com/
• A poem from Andrew Demcak at The Nervous Breakdown
• A web portfolio from Valyntina Grenier 
• Graham Foust introduces Sally Delehant's poem over at Catch Up
• An interview withBrett Fletcher Laurer at Penn

January 2012

• Justin Kibbe's literary art exhibit and newsletter

November 2011

• Check out Sally Delehant reading at The Cultural Society 10th Anniversary reading.

• Joshua Braff in the Huffington Post
• Lily Brown reads from Rust or Go Missing

October 2011

• Andrew Demack's Night Chant is published by Lethe Press!
• Angela Hume's poetry chapbook, /Second Story of Your Body/, a series of lyric fragments, is now available from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs: http://yoyolabs.com/secondstoryofyourbody.html.
• Interview with Josh Braff at Becky Bowden.com
• Sara Mumolo announced as a finalist for the 1913's First Book Award judged by Fanny Howe
• An Interview with Lily Brown at Authors Compare

September 2011

MFA Alumni establish the MFA Alumni Scholarship Fund aka "Two Beer a Year Fund."  MFA Alumni Fund Scholarships are given annually by alumni who can contribute to a fund in varying amounts—some with larger gifts and some with very small contributions. Our MFA alumni graduate with a very high degree of satisfaction, and wish to pass along the gift of a writer’s education to future generations of writers.  Give up “Two-Beers-A-Year” or “Two-Lattés-a-Year” and donate as little as ten dollars to the MFA Alumni Scholarship Fund.  The MFA Program welcomes contributions to this Alumni Fund in any amount and thanks our generous Alumni.  Please contact Director, Brenda Hillman at (925) 631-4457 or bhillman@stmarys-ca.edu about donating or just send in a check.

August 2011

Brett Fletcher Lauer, class of 2007, was selected as a runner-up for the Pen Emerging Writers Award.