"Abstract
Wall"
Copyright ©
2005 by James Daigh
The following are recent accomplishments by MFA program students, alumni, and faculty.
TERESA ALBERTSON will be teaching two classes with the Des Moines Area Community College Success Center this fall.
JESSICA BENJAMIN has accepted a new position as a grant writer at New Leaders for New Schools in New York City.
KRIS BIGALK has been chosen to be the 2009-2010 Writer-in-Residence at the Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts in Fridley. She will get 24/7 access to a writing studio and will be planning some classes and readings.
CANDACE BLACK'S has poems recently in Colere 2009, Turtle Quarterly, and Midwest Mix. Her chapbook Casa Marina was chosen by Marianne Boruch as the winner of RopeWalk Press’ Thomas Wilhelmus Award and will be published later this year.
MELISSA BRANDT'S screenplay about King Lear's daughter Cordelia has been picked up by Unanimous Pictures and will star Imogen Poots (28 Weeks Later, V for Vendetta). Filming begins soon. For more information, see http://www.screendaily.com/poots-takes-on-cordelia-for-chris-coens-unanimous/5001238.article
LEAH CHRISTENSEN, JUSTIN ERICKSON, JACOB MARIETTE, and NAHUM WELANG are all recent BA/BFA graduates who have been accepted into MFA programs for the 2009-2010 school years.
KRISTIN DODGE has accepted a position as assistant professor of English at South University. Her work will be strictly online or extended campus—teaching, developing new curriculum, and managing adjunct faculty. Mothers and Sons Anthology is publishing two nonfiction pieces, "Good Doors" and "Soccer Mom," in 2010.
KASANDRA DUTHIE has accepted a full-time instructorship at St. Paul College.
RICHARD GREELIS' memoir CopBook has just been published by Beaver's Pond Press.
NICK HEALY won the 2009 Tamarack Award sponsored by Minnesota Monthly. He’ll receive a cash award and have his story published in the November 2009 issue.
CATHERINE HOOPER is now a grant writer at Catholic Charities of Kansas City-St. Joseph. She is also the new Director of Operations at The Writer's Place Midwest Center for the Literary Arts.
AMI IRMEN has been hired as a freelancer to write several articles for Door County Travelers Journal; they have also accepted several photos to go along with each article. She has also accepted an adjunct position at Kishwaukee Community College teaching three different courses. The college is located in Malta, IL.
BERNICE JOHNSON’S The Shan: Refugees without a Camp has been published by Trinity Matrix Press.
DIANA JOSEPH'S essay “The Devil I Know Is the Man Upstairs,” originally published in Willow Springs, was listed as a Notable Essay of the Year in The Best American Essays 2009 and was given a “Special Mention” in the Puschcart Prize Anthology.
PHIL MacKENZIE is teaching full-time at Cameron University.
For a chapbook-length writing sample, JACOB MARIETTE won Florida Atlantic University's Rose Kurhan Shapiro Poetry Competition. The prize earned him $400.
JOSH OLSEN has had two manuscripts accepted for publication, the first a chapbook of prose poems, On a Train Back to Michigan, to be published by Paper Hero Press, and the second a book of flash fiction, Six Months, to be published by Tainted Coffee Press. A poem, "KT and I" is scheduled for an upcoming issue of New York Quarterly.
ALEX PHILLIPS' story "Strung" will appear in issue #3 of A Cappella Zoo.
JEAN PROKOTT has accepted a position teaching English at Hutchinson High School.
RICHARD ROBBINS gave readings in New York and Oregon and published creative nonfiction in Brevity. Eclipse and New Madrid published poems. His book-length manuscript Radioactive City won the Bellday Poetry Prize and will be published this fall by Bellday Books.
LISA M. BOLT SIMONS’ fourth book is coming out this fall. Currently, she’s writing for the new southern Minnesota arts magazine Midwest Mix. Her website is www.lisamboltsimons.com.
JON SURDO has accepted an adjunct position at Anoka Ramsey Community College for the fall.
RICHARD TERRILL’S new book of poems Almost Dark has been accepted by the University of Tampa Press and has a release date of Fall 2010.
27 STUDENTS AND FACULTY attended the AWP Conference in Chicago in February, where they merged, often unawares, with about the same number of MSU creative writing alumni.
BRIAN BAUMGART has accepted a tenure-track position at North Hennepin Community College. He will be starting there this summer.
KRIS BIGALK has poems forthcoming in 14 by 14, Modern English Tanka, 2009 Dust and Fire, and The Binnacle literary magazines. She was also a runner-up for the 2009 Normandale Community College Board of Trustees Award for Excellence in Teaching.
CANDACE BLACK'S poem, "Fitzroy Road," appears in the Spring 2009 Third Coast. Her poem "Grouper" was published in Rhino 2009.
KRISTYN BLESSING had four tanka published in the spring issue of Modern English Tanka.
JENNY YANG CROPP'S poems "Dragon in Snow" and "Orbit" will appear in the 2010 volume of Eclipse. "Her Story," "Monsoon Season," and "Inhale" will appear in the next issue of Superstition Review, and "Head of Dvarapalas" and "Oriental" will appear in the upcoming issue of Hayden's Ferry Review.
LUKE DALY'S poem "Some Beasts" will soon appear in Basalt.
ANDE DAVIS had a story, "Under the Milo Bin," published at Fiction Weekly (www.fictionweekly.com). His "How to Be a Giant Cartoon Mouse" will appear in The Ampersand Review.
JENNIFER FANDEL has been promoted to Marketing and Sales Manager at Southern Illinois University Press. The press publishes a wide variety of scholarly and trade books, including the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. She has been with the press nearly three years.
AMI IRMEN just wrapped on her first independent film, Project Solitude, where she acted as the Production Secretary/Asst to UPM/Transportation Coordinator. The film is currently scheduled to be released in 2009. She has also been hired to write several articles that will appear about another film, Nephilim, as well as to write a spinoff of the Nephilim comic book series called Mercy and Justice, which will chronicle the life of one of the Nephilim characters.
DIANA JOSEPH'S essay "It's Me. It's Him. It's Them" has been included in The River Teeth Reader, a double issue that features the best of ten years of River Teeth. Her memoir I'm Sorry You Feel That Way has been selected as an Indie Next List Notable for April.
PHIL MacKENZIE has accepted a full-time instructorship in composition at Cameron University in Lawton, OK.
THOMAS MALTMAN'S The Night Birds was selected by the ALA as an Outstanding Book for the College Bound in 2009. In October, he'll be heading down to Jefferson City, Missouri (the state capitol) for the Community Wide Reads Program. He was recently hired full-time at Normandale Community College.
MATTHEW MAUCH was recently hired full-time at Normandale Community College.
BILL McDONALD continues to write weekly columns for the Stillwater Gazette.
CHRISTINA OLSON has new work forthcoming in Sou'wester, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, Gulf Coast, Linebreak, and The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3.
MATTHEW PIZZA won Blue Earth Review's Undergraduate Award in Prose for his story "Twilight Lake," which will appear in the Spring 2009 issue of BER.
RICHARD ROBBINS has new poems in American Literary Review, Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, and Thin Air, and an essay in New Ohio Review. He was recently elected Midwest Programs Representative to the AWP Board of Directors and this spring was named an MSU Distinguished Faculty Scholar. In April, the Poetry Society of America will present him with The Writer magazine/Emily Dickinson and Louis Hammer Memorial awards.
LUKE ROLFES' story "The Tenth Highest Mountain in the World" is being published by Another Chicago Magazine, and another story "The Living, the Dying" is being published by Word Riot.
AARON RUDOLPH is a temporary instructor, full time, at Cameron University.
TRISHA SPEED SHASKAN had the following books published by Picture Window Books: If you were a Minute, If you were a Divided-By Sign, and If you were a Times Sign. This spring she won a $25,000 McKnight Fellowship for Writers, Loft Award in Children's Literature/Older Children.
ROGER SHEFFER'S story "Disabled Person Disembarking at Our Next Stop" won first prize in The Baltimore Review's fiction contest. His story "Canal" was the the winner of the 2008 William Richey Short Story Contest, sponsored by Yemesee Journal.
LISA SIMONS is doing signings at the Mall of America and at the Xcel Center (coinciding with a home game) to celebrate her new book about the Minnesota Wild.
RICHARD TERRILL has published a poem "I Kept the Part About Turning Fifty" in Iowa Review, and an essay, "Neighbors," in South Loop Review: Creative Nonfiction + Art. This spring, he was named an MSU Distinguished Faculty Scholar.
LUCIAN YOUNG won Blue Earth Review's Undergraduate Award in Poetry for his poem "Play," which will appear in the Spring 2009 issue of BER.
MARIANNE ZARZANA published "A Canticle for the Freckled" in the Bumbershoot humor issue of the online journal Umbrella.
TERESA ALBERTSON is doing school-district reporting for the Ames Tribune.
BRIAN BAUMGART published a poem in Sweet.
KRIS BIGALK'S poetry will appear in The Minnetonka Review, Caveat Lector, Main Channel Voices, Ribbons, New York Quarterly, Forge, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Pank literary magazines. Bigalk is also presenting “Creative Writing at the Community College” at the 2008 TYCA Conference, “Navigating Open Waters” in Duluth, and will moderate two sessions, “The Two-Year College Caucus” and “MFA, BFA...AFA?” at the 2009 AWP Conference in Chicago.
KRISTYN BLESSING has accepted a full-time position teaching ESL at Michigan Tech University.
ERIC BRAUN’S short story, “Sliding, 1977,” is up on The Stickman Review at www.stickmanreview.com/V7N1/index.html. Another story is live at Eclectica.org. He also has a fantasy baseball story forthcoming in the baseball journal Elysian Fields Quarterly, available in print and online after August 25.
THOM CHESNEY has taken a position with The University of Texas at Dallas as Associate Provost. He heads up their assessment, accreditation and student success initiatives.
DAVID CLISBEE was named the 2008 Nadine B. Andreas Graduate Assistant.
ANTOINETTE COLE’S story "Water Mommies" was accepted by Crab Orchard Review and will appear in their Winter/Spring 2009 issue. She’s currently working for a market research company in Chicago.
JENNY CROPP was awarded the Toy Wilson Blethen Fine Arts Award for outstanding creative accomplishment during her career at MSU. She was also accepted into a Ph.D. program in creative writing at Oklahoma State University, where she received the Burris Award for promising incoming graduate students and a Doctoral Stipend Enhancement Award.
LUKE DALY’S poem "Pistolera Recollections" will appear soon in Cream City Review.
JORGE EVANS was a panelist at The Loft Literary Center’s Poetry Festival in October.
JENNIFER FANDEL was recently promoted to marketing manager for Southern Illinois University Press.
JADE FAUL published her story “New York” in Great Kills Review and her story “Holding On” in Oracle.
AMI IRMEN has been hired as a production assistant with Pulse Communications, currently in pre-production for Nephilim, an independent film that is shooting in Green Bay and Milwaukee.
KATIE LACEY was accepted to the University of Nebraska—Lincoln’s PhD program in English (starting in the fall). She’s been given a five-year teaching assistantship, and the Christos Pulos Fellowship for the first year. She’ll be teaching two courses per semester, mostly first year composition.
NATHAN LeBOUTILLIER accepted the position of Assistant Director of Writing/ESL at MSU's Center for Academic Success (the MSU campus tutoring center) and wrote four children's nonfiction pro football books for The Creative Company, forthcoming in Winter 2008.
BRONSON LEMER has accepted a full-time job teaching English composition at a university in China through Fort Hays State University. He will also teach a 6-8 week college composition course (offered through Central Texas College) this summer aboard the Navy’s USS Chancellorsville.
THOMAS MALTMAN accepted a new position as Visiting Artist in Creative Writing at Normandale Community College.
MATT MAUCH will be teaching full time as Faculty in English at Normandale Community College starting in August. He leaves a full time position in the English Department at Hennepin Technical College.
EDWARD MICUS’S book The Infirmary won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize sponsored by Kent State University Press. The book will be published in the fall of 2009. He will be invited to read at Kent State with the judge, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn.
NATE MELCHER performs his solo musical comedy improv show, "The Uncle Ukulele Show," this summer at the San Francisco Improv Festival, the Santa Cruz Improv Festival, and the Milwaukee Sketch & Improv Festival. For fall term, he is teaching at Normandale Community College.
CHRISTINA OLSON has accepted a position as a visiting professor of writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, MI.
MELIAN REESE is teaching adjunct courses at the Maple Woods campus of Metropolitan Community College in addition to her adjunct work at Kansas City Kansas Community College.
RICHARD ROBBINS published poems in Basalt, Hubbub, Pacific Passages: An Anthology of Surf Writing, Stand, and The Kerf. He gave readings this fall at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula, the Yellowstone Writers’ Collective in Billings, and Winona State University.
LUKE ROLFES accepted a full-time instructorship at Northwest Missouri State University. His story “Naked” was published by Hamilton Stone Review.
TRISHA SPEED SHASKAN recently had eleven books published by Picture Window Books: Fair Game, Green Park, If You were a Compound Word, If You were a Contraction, I am a Sea horse: The Life of a Dwarf Sea Horse, I am an Octopus: The Life of a Common Octopus, If You were a Fraction, If You were a Minus Sign, If You were a Plus Sign, The Fairies' First Flight, and Betty and Baxter's Batter Battle.
ROGER SHEFFER won First Prize and $1000 in the 7th Annual Fugue Fiction Contest. His story “Driving School” will appear in the Fall/Winter issue.
JESSICA SMITH’S story “Benign Positional Vertigo” is coming out in the Portland Review in its next issue.
RICHARD TERRILL published poems in New Letters, Epicenters (http://www.bc.edu/clubs/epicenters) and on Poetry Daily for July 26 (www.poems.com). An essay, “At Himmel’s Cottage” appears in the anthology Chautauqua: 20th Anniversary of the Chautauqua Writers’ Center.
DAN WAHL is teaching composition full time (fixed term) at Winona State University. Recently, he’s published Ursa stories in The Midway Journal.
NATHAN WARDINSKI has accepted a position at the Winona State University library, supervising the night staff of student workers, helping patrons, and doing a little computer work.
SCOTT WROBEL won Third Coast magazine’s creative nonfiction prize. See http://www.thirdcoastmagazine.com/ for more details.
TERESA ALBERTSON was invited to teach for two days at the Children's Creative Writing Workshop in Mankato in March. She led a group of more than 75 students from 3rd-9th grade. She was also invited to speak at the Momapaloza Mankato, where she will read fiction and nonfiction as it relates to motherhood.
LESLEY ARIMAH received honorable mention in the 2008 Robert Wright Awards.
Creative writing undergraduate EMILY BARTZ won the Norman Adams Award in the 2008 round of English Department Awards.
JESSICA BENJAMIN has accepted a full-time grant writing position at StoryCorps, a nonprofit which seeks to create a growing portrait of who we are as Americans through one of the largest oral history projects of its kind. She was also selected as a finalist for the Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize judged by Sue William Silverman. The department awarded her its Outstanding English Graduate Student Award for 2007-08.
Two poems by KRIS BIGALK, “Dancing With Gene” and “Confession,” will appear in the 2008 edition of Dust and Fire, Bemidji State's annual anthology of
women's writing and art. Her poem “Tanka” appeared in the winter issue of The Barefoot Muse: A Journal of Formal and Metrical Verse.
CANDACE BLACK'S essay “The Stone Rose” has been published in the Fall 2007 issue of Turnrow.
ANTOINETTE COLE is one of two finalists for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. She has been invited to attend the award ceremony on July, 25 in Washington, D.C., and will receive a cash prize of $500.
BECKY DAVIS was awarded a 2008 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Recently, her novel-in-progress AllieCat was named a Loft-McKnight Honor Book for children ages eight and up.
DAN DeWOLF placed third in the 2008 Robert Wright Awards.
KASANDRA DUTHIE’S story “The Howling Dog Cliché” will be out in the next issue of Hayden's Ferry Review. This term she is teaching three courses at Normandale Community College.
JORGE EVANS placed second in the 2008 Robert Wright Awards. He recently had two poems accepted by Talking River Review. Earlier in the semester, he had a poem taken by a small press in NJ called Poets Wear Prada Press for an anthology on bugs. They posted his poem on their blog, which can be found at http://poetswearprada.blogspot.com/2008/01/jorge-evans-lady-bugs.html.
JADE FAUL published a story recently in Inkling.
RICHANDA GRANT’S essay “Mixed Blood” will be forthcoming in an issue of Iconoclast.
NICK HEALY was awarded a 2008 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. His story “Joyless Men” will be in the 2008 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories from Del Sol Press, due out this summer.
DIANA JOSEPH’S essay “The Devil I Know is the Man Upstairs” is in the current issue of Willow Springs and may be viewed at http://willowsprings.ewu.edu/archives/joseph.pdf. Her essay “It's Me. It's Him. It's Them” has been published in the current issue of River Teeth.
JILL KALZ'S picture book Farmer Cap was a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award in the Children’s Literature category and the winner of the Readers’ Choice Award.
ANNA KELLEY’S essay “Cut My Hair” will appear in the May 2008 issue of Epicenters, the arts magazine of Boston College. Her essay “Iowa Rock, Iowa Mud” has been published by the Dubuque Area Writers Guild in the anthology Celebrating The Art & Ethos of Dubuque.
THOMAS MALTMAN’S Night Birds was one of ten 2008 recipients of an Alex Award from the American Library Association. The Alex Awards were created to recognize that many teens enjoy and often prefer books written for adults, and to assist librarians in recommending adult books that appeal to teens. Night Birds also won a Spur Award for Best First Novel from the Western Writers of America. The book was also among those named Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and was just given a Friends of American Writers Literary Award.
NATE MELCHER had his solo musical comedy improv show, “Uncle Ukulele,” accepted into the San Francisco Improv Festival this summer, marking his sixth improv festival appearance.
CONNIE COLWELL MILLER accepted a position as Student Relations Coordinator for the College of Arts and Humanities at Minnesota State University, Mankato. Her book of poems Bodywearers was chosen as the 2006 Upper Midwest Writers Series Selection and has been published as an e-chapbook through Sol Books.
DODIE MILLER has accepted a full-time position at Ivy Tech Community College in Fort Wayne, IN. She will teach a variety of writing and other humanities courses. Her story, “With Dogs” will appear in the spring issue of Apostrophe, the literary magazine of the University of Saint Francis.
CHRISTINA OLSON’S book Before I Came Home Naked just won the 2007 Spire Press Poetry Contest. She will be awarded $500, and her manuscript will be published next year. In another bit of good news, Gerald Stern chose her poem as the 2008 Poetry Prize winner in The Dirty Napkin magazine competition.
MEGAN PLATT, a student in English 344 at MSU, had two poems accepted by The Inkling. The titles are “I Was on the Eagle When You Drowned,” and “Silent Parade in February.”
RICHARD ROBBINS published a short story, “Onion Creek,” in Chariton Review. Poems appear in the current issues of St. Ann’s Review and Cincinnati Review. His new book The Untested Hand came out in February from The Backwaters Press.
LUKE ROLFES’ story “Monster” will appear in The Rake, and another story, “Mountain Passing,” has just been accepted by Passages North.
LINDSAY SCHACHT placed first in the 2008 Robert Wright Awards.
TRISH SHASKAN’S This is Anna was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. She has more titles coming out from Picture Window Books in the fall.
ROGER SHEFFER'S story “Three Davids” recently won the 2008 Third Coast fiction prize ($1000). The contest was judged by Pam Houston; the story will appear in Third Coast later this year.
RICHARD TERRILL'S essay “Yet Again to the Lake,” originally published in Colorado Review, was listed as a Notable Essay of the Year in The Best American Essays 2007. He also has an essay, “House in the Suburbs” in Brevity 27, Spring 2008: http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity
Creative writing undergraduate JENNA VOGEL won the Marcia Thompson Award in the 2008 round of English Department Awards.
Creative writing undergraduate NAHUM WELANG won the William A. Payne Memorial Award in the 2008 round of English Department Awards.
NATHAN WARDINSKI’S piece titled “The Satanic Politic” has been published in The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of Satanism, edited by James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen.JASON BENESH is an adjunct professor at Oklahoma City Community College, where he teaches Composition and Introduction to Logic.
CANDACE BLACK'S essay “Postcards from the Sunflower State” appears in Blueroad: Stardust and Fate (Blueroad Press). Two poems, ”Spit and Polish” and “Trolling,” appear in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Great River Review.
KRIS BIGALK'S one page play, “Casualty,” was selected to be performed at Theatre Vertigo's One-Page Play Festival, “Dirty Laundry: America's Best UN-kept Secrets” this fall in Portland, Oregon. More info at http://www.theatrevertigo.org/One of her poems will be appearing in the Winter 2008 edition of The Barefoot Muse: A Journal of Formal and Metrical Verse.
ERIC BRAUN, who received his MFA from MSU a few years ago, has been awarded the Tamarack Award from Minnesota Monthly. The prize comes with a $10,000 check and publication in the magazine.
DAVID CLISBEE’s poem “Bait” will appear in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of Ninth Letter.
KRISTIN DODGE has just accepted a position at South University as an assistant professor in the English Department. Her position is solely for online courses in composition, creative writing, and literature. She'll also be continuing her role as mentor for the Challenge Program for the English Department at Southwest Minnesota State University.
NICK HEALY has stories appearing in Water~Stone Review, Great River Review, and Broken Bridge Review. He also had a flash piece accepted for Blink Again: Sudden Fiction from the Upper Midwest, which will be released by Spout Press in 2008.
DIANA JOSEPH'S “What's (Not) Simple” received the Dr. Neila C. Seshacharo Award. This $500 prize is presented annually to the author of the best work published in Weber Studies the previous year.
Recent alumnus THOMAS MALTMAN’S The Night Birds was released by Soho Press in June. It received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and is an American Booksellers Association BookSense Pick for August.
NATE MELCHER performed his solo musical comedy improv show, "Uncle Ukulele," at the 2007 Gainesville Improv Festival. He previously performed with comedy improv duo, "Puny Humans," at the Chicago Improv Festival (2004), the Toronto International Improv Festival (2005), the first-annual Denver Improv Festival (2005), and performed solo comedy improv at the Miami Improv Festival (2006).
JOSH OLSEN has a full-time instructorship at the University of Michigan and teaches extra courses at Wayne State University and Washtenaw Community College.
RICHARD ROBBINS has recently published stories in Weber Studies and poems in Blueroad, Good Foot, Great River Review, Meridian, and Windfall.
LUKE ROLFES’ story “Shells” won first place in fiction in the Discovered Voices Contest sponsored by Iron Horse Literary Review.
ROGER SHEFFER'S story “Blood on My Shoes” was a finalist for the John
Gardner Memorial Prize for Fiction, and appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of
Harpur Palate.
JESSICA SMITH has accepted a full-time position at Central Maine Community College. She will be teaching reading, writing, and literature courses.
RICHARD TERRILL had three poems included in the on-line anthology Enskyment (enskyment.org), which also features the work of Billy Collins, Philip Levine, and Marge Piercy.
One of SCOTT WROBEL’S stories, “Storage,” appears in the October issue of The Rake. He also had a story in Identity Theory in August called “Motor Repair.”SARA BIREN’S “Abundance” was published in upstreet 2, a literary magazine out of Massachusetts. The story will also be featured on their web site www.upstreet-mag.org.
CANDACE BLACK’S poem “Vigil” has been reprinted in the anthology To Sing Along the Way: Minnesota Women Poets from Pre-Territorial Days to the Present.
TYLER CORBETT has taken a part-time job teaching composition at NorthWest Arkansas Community College, not far from Fayetteville, AR, where he lives with his beautiful wife Kate.
KRISTIN DODGE has accepted a position as senior marketing copywriter for James Tower, a Web-based marketing and communications business. Her screenplay, “Mistress,” received second place in the Tinseltown-10 Screenwriting competition. It automatically goes to ten of the top agencies in L.A. She sold a nonfiction piece, “Mother Mary,” for an anthology on mothers and sons. “Dianan,” a screenplay about the daughter of Celtic warrior Boudicca, won first place in the 6th Annual Freedom Award for screenwriting.
BEN DREVLOW’S just got two short stories accepted by Passages North. “Brother” and “Fish for Everybody” will both appear soon. His book Bend With the Knees and Other Love Advice From My Father won the Many Voices Project Award from New Rivers Press. His book will be published in 2008.
PAUL FRIED has work in the “Art of Recovery” project, cosponsored by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety Office of Justice Programs and the Minnesota State Arts Board. About the work: www.arts.state.mn.us/aor/2007/artists/Fried.htm. The poem itself is at www.arts.state.mn.us/aor/2007/docs/FRIED_New%20Years%20Shot.pdf.
SARA HEIN has accepted two adjunct positions—at Carroll College in Waukesha, WI, and at Bryant and Stratton College in Milwaukee—where she will teach developmental composition and/or composition.
DIANA JOSEPH’S story “Beast With Two Backs” is forthcoming in the next issue of Puerto del Sol. Her story “If You Can’t Say Something Nice” will appear in the upcoming issue of Permafrost.
Two books by JILL KALZ have been included in the 2007 edition of the “Best Children’s Books of the Year” by the Children’s Book Committee at Bank Street College of Education in New York City. Galen’s Camera and Tuckerbean (Picture Window Books, 2006) were chosen based on literary quality, excellence of presentation, and the books’ emotional impact on children. Jill’s books were two of just 12 titles in the Beginning Readers category. She has published nearly 50 books for children and currently works as a children’s book editor.
CASSANDRA LABAIRON had two poems taken by Fickle Muses, “Hera Spies on Zeus From the Corner Booth at the Diner” and “Bodhisattva.” She also contributes to the Northography web site and read recently at the Northography reading in Saint Paul.
BRONSON LEMER’S essay “Olympic Hopefuls” was given honorable mention in this year's AWP Intro Journals Project.
NATHAN MELCHER took “Best Cartoon - Second Place” from the Minnesota Newspaper Association’s “College Better Newspaper Contest” for an editorial cartoon which appeared in the MSU Reporter. Additional MSU Reporter cartoons by Melcher took second place for Editorial Cartooning from the Society of Professional Journalists’ “Mark of Excellence Awards - Region 6.” Melcher previously took first place in 2000 and 2001 for his editorial cartooning at The Minnesota Daily (University of Minnesota).
ANDREW MILLER’S hypothetical questions for an interview with John Mayer ended up winning him the National Rolling Stone Challenge. Rollingstone.com printed his questions, then John Mayer answered them, then US Weekly and People Magazine picked up the interview and posted stories on their Web sites.
DODIE MILLER has been contracted to write several articles about American history 1971-2000 and Popular Music of the 1980’s and MTV in the 1980’s by Salem Press of Pasadena, California. The articles will appear as entries for the press’ Great Events from American History 1971-2000 and America in the Eighties encyclopedia series, respectively.
CHRISTINA OLSON’S poem “In Which Christina Imagines Different Types of Alcohol are Men and She is Seeing Them All” was a finalist for the first annual Poetry Southeast prize and will appear in its Summer 2007 issue. Another poem will appear in an upcoming Hayden’s Ferry Review.
JEAN PROKOTT has accepted an editorial internship at Graywolf Press.
LINDA RIDLEHUBER has had two poems accepted for publication by Calyx, to be published sometime in 2008.
RICHARD ROBBINS had three poems published in Where One Voice Ends, Another Begins: 150 Years of Minnesota Poetry.
In January 2007, TRISHA SPEED SHASKAN had the following books published by Picture Window Books: This is Anna, Princess Bella's Birthday Cake, Camden's Game, and Marconi the Wizard. All four books are easy readers.
REED STRATTON has accepted a part-time lectureship at Marquette University.
RICHARD TERRILL’S “Yet Again to the Lake” was published in Colorado Review. A poem, “Last Great Places (North)” is forthcoming in Green Mountains Review special issue on apocalypse.BRIAN BAUMGART is teaching at Century College.
JESSICA BENJAMIN is Director of Development for The Arc of Minnesota Southwest, where she writes grants and is involved with other fundraising, edits the newsletter, and is responsible for PR.
CANDACE BLACK spent the first two weeks of August in Vietnam conducting research for nonfiction projects, thanks to a MSU, Mankato Teaching Scholar Fellowship. Her poem "Missing" appears in the Fall/Winter 2006-07 edition of Ninth Letter. She recently read some of her poetry at Birch Bark Books in Minneapolis.
BOB BLEDSOE has just been hired as a lecturer, full time, for the coming academic year in the English Department at UW-Eau Claire.
TYLER CORBETT has had a story taken by The Apalachee Review.
JENNY YANG CROPP has a poem, “To String Theory,” on the current Poetry Southeast web site.
JENNIFER DAHLEN is a full-time instructor at Northland Community and Technical College in East Grand Forks, MN.
REBECCA DAVIS was recently offered a tenure-track appointment at South Central College.
JENNIFER FANDEL is now Editing and Promotions Manager with Southern Illinois University Press, in charge of coordinating exhibits at academic conferences, implementing space advertising and direct mail campaigns, and submitting press titles for awards.
STEVE GEHRKE’S book of poems Michelangelo’s Seizure was a 2005 winner of The National Poetry Series. The book will appear later this year. He has just accepted a tenure-track position at Seton Hall University.
JESSICA GUNDERSON won the Rowland Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for a four-week residency this coming March. She will be in residence with Andrea Barrett and John Keeble. Other than writing her own fiction, she has been writing books for Capstone, Creative Company, and Stone Arch Books, and teaching online for Axia College and University of Phoenix.
GWEN HART’S poem "Ex-Boyfriends in Heaven" was aired on National Public Radio’s “Writer's Almanac” on Thursday, 7/13.
NICK HEALY has had a story accepted by Great River Review.
HANS HETRICK has accepted a technical writing position at Liquid Controls in Lake Bluff, IL.
CHRISSY (BENDEL) KLESH is managing a volunteer program at two non-profit agencies in Sioux Falls. She trains and recruits volunteers to work in a domestic violence shelter, be mentors to kids, and to be involved in fundraisers. Before that, she spent a year working as a teacher in a juvenile detention center and took graduate courses in education.
CASSANDRA LABAIRON, who has been teaching for South Central College and MSU's extended campus for a few years, was recently offered a full-time, tenure-track appointment at South Central.
ALLEN LEARST’s nonfiction piece, "The Blood of Children," will appear this Fall in the Water~Stone Review (Hamline University). He has a short-short, "When Water Breaks from the Shore," appearing in the Winter/Spring issue of Passages North (Northern Michigan University). He was a finalist in the nonfiction contest category for the Summer Literature Semester in Kenya judged by Phillip Lopate.
DAVID MOEN works for CenturyTel in La Crosse.
NICK LaROCCA is teaching full-time at Palm Beach Community College.
BRONSON LEMER read a portion of his essay "The Mustache Race" Oct. 11 at the KGB Bar in New York City, as part of the Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers reading and book release event.
KRISTINA LILLEBERG has been promoted to instruction designer for the Graduate School of Higher Education at Kaplan University.
JOSH OLSEN is teaching at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University.
LEIGH POMEROY received a fellowship from the Center for Independent Media, which pays him for writing on Minnesota Monitor <http://www.minnesotamonitor.org>. He also writes the wine column for Mankato Magazine.
RICHARD ROBBINS had poems published in Pebble Lake Review and an essay published in Static. A poem from his most recent book was recently reprinted on the Poetry365 web site, and another currently appears on the Poetry Southeast web site.
JESS SMITH had a story taken by The Louisville Review and has picked up work as an instructor at The University of Buffalo.
CHRIS STARK won first place for an excerpt from her novel, Nickels, in the PEARLS Writing Contest, and second place for an excerpt from Nickels in the Inglis House Poetry Contest. One of her essays is out in an anthology titled Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate About the Sex Industry. An excerpt from her novel Carnival Lights and a poem are due out in Ottertail Review. A poem appears in August's Lunarosity and another in the most recent issue of Rain and Thunder.
DAN WAHL has accepted a visiting instructorship at Western Carolina University.
MFA alumnus and fiction writer SCOTT WROBEL was recently announced as a winner of a Loft Mentor Award, sponsored by the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.CANDACE BLACK, HANS HETRICK, KRISTINA LILLEBERG, NATE LEBOUTILLIER, and RICHARD ROBBINS had an impromptu faculty/alumni reunion at the Pearl Jam concert in Chicago in May.
JENNY CROPP’S “Stealing Kimchi” appears at The Oklahoma Review web site: http://www.cameron.edu/okreview/vol7_1/poems-3-8.html. “To String Theory” will appear in the fall issue of Poetry Southeast.
At the October, 2005 MnSCU Conference, “Writing and Literature: Teaching New Audiences and Each Other,” at Inver Hills College, PAUL FRIED gave a paper/presentation titled “Teaching Literature after 9/11: Rethinking What We Read and How We Read it.” At the February, 2006 Southwest/Texas Popular & American Culture Associations Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he gave a Creative Writing Pedagogy paper/presentation titled, “Till You Can’t Get it Wrong: Self-evaluation and a Music-practice Analogy in Creative Writing Workshops.”
DIANA JOSEPH sold her book of essays about men to Warner Books.
BRONSON LEMER’S essay “The Mustache Race” will appear in Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers: The Best New Voices of 2006, a Random House trade paperback due out at the end of August. His essay “Read Between the ( ),” along with pictures, will be published in an upcoming issue of The Grapevine.
MSU alum NANCY LOEWEN, now a graduate student in Hamline University’s MFA program, has received a 2005 Intro Award for her story “Harvest.” Her work, one of five recipients in the fiction category, competed against approximately 300 other stories from 400+ Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) member programs. The story will be published in an upcoming issue of Mid-American Review (Bowling Green SU).
THOMAS MALTMAN, a spring 2005 graduate, has sold his novel The Night Birds to Soho Press.
NATHAN MELCHER is a features writer for YESand.com, a national comedy improv news/resource web site. His two most recent articles were posted recently, both about improv in Hawaii. He’s also the host of YESand.com's brand-new podcast series, Flyspace, and he interviewed Mo Collins (Mad TV, The 40-Year-Old Virgin) about her upcoming appearance at the Chicago Improv Festival, synchronized swimming, and her mobile trailer collection.
CHRISTINA OLSON has had a poem taken by Cream City Review.
JEAN PROKOTT’S poem “How I Met Beethoven in the North Memorial Psych Ward, 1999 (In C# Minor)” has received a 2005 Intro Award, sponsored by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). One of eight winners in the poetry category, her work competed against approximately 1000 other entries from 400+ AWP member programs and will be published in an upcoming issue of Quarterly West (U of Utah).
RICHARD ROBBINS’ “Walking Around Seattle Center” appears in the Spring 2006 issue of Front Range Review.
ROGER SHEFFER’S short story “Birgitta” will be appearing soon in Northwest Review.
JESSICA SMITH has had a story accepted by Permafrost.As a result of a writing contest sponsored by Café Diem, an Ames-area coffee shop, TERESA ALBERTSON’S “A Dark and Stormy Night” will appear this spring in an anthology of short stories.
BRIAN BAUMGART has a nonfiction book for teens about the culture of Mexico forthcoming from Compass Point Books as part of their Global Connections Series.
CANDACE BLACK'S poem “Blue” appeared in the Summer/Fall 2005 issue of Birmingham Poetry Review.
NICK HEALY’S Muhammad Ali: Genius is a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in the area of Children’s and Young Adult Nonfiction. Winners in all categories will be announced on April 29. Nick’s story “Squirt” was awarded third place out of more than 7700 entries in the Writer’s Digest Annual Short Story Competition. He will receive $500 and have his story published on the magazine’s web site.
NICOLE HELGET’S Summer of Ordinary Ways is a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award in the area of Autobiography, Memoir, and Creative Nonfiction. Winners in all categories will be announced on April 29. She also recently sold an essay, “Pip,” about parenting after divorce, to the anthology For Better or Worse, to be published by Five Spot/Warner Books.
New faculty member DIANA JOSEPH won the 27th Women Writers Conference Prize for Creative Nonfiction. She will go to Lexington, KY, later in the spring to receive her award to give a reading with Sarah Vowell. In recent months, she’s published a short story published in Weber Studies and an essay in Marginalia.
MFA graduate JILL KALZ has recently published six easy readers with Picture Window Books: Bears on Ice, Flying with Oliver, Galen's Camera, Mike's Night-Light, Pony Party, and Tuckerbean. She is also the author of 30+ nonfiction titles for kids in K–8.
Trafford Publishing has published WILLIAM McDONALD’S At the Oasis, a collection of essays and poems.
JENNY MARKS was recently awarded a $1000 grant from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council. She’ll be taking two trips to generate and revise new poems for publication. One will be a 4-day/3-night writing/biking trek on the Sakatah Singing Hills state trail; the other will be a weekend stay at a lake cabin in Alexandria, MN to revise. After the project is completed, she will have a reading to share her work publicly.
EDWARD MICUS’ short story “Miracle on 3W” was published recently in Confrontation, and “Nurse” appeared in Static.
DODIE MILLER has had a fiction submission accepted for presentation at the First Annual Scissortail Writer's Festival in Ada, Oklahoma. She is the 2006 winner of both the Robert Wright Award and the Sponberg Award.
GREGORY NICOLAI has a poem in the current issue of The MacGuffin. His book on Vietnam will come out from Compass Point in the fall.
CHRISTINA OLSON has poems forthcoming in Puerto del Sol and Spoon River Poetry Review.
For longtime work on the Good Thunder Reading Series and in the creative writing program at MSU, RICHARD ROBBINS will be awarded the Kay Sexton Award at the Minnesota Book Awards gala at The Woman’s Club of Minneapolis on April 29.
TRISHA SHASKAN has been contracted to write four more easy readers for Picture Window Books. All four of the books are fiction.
CHRIS STARK recently won Honorable Mention in the Vermillion Literary Project (U of South Dakota) 2006 Holidays-on-Ice Contest for her short story “Thanksgiving.” Musician Fred Ho commissioned her to write the second verse for “Blase redux”—a remake of “Blase” by saxophonist Archie Shepp. He plans to record it in June.
RICHARD TERRILL has poems in Water~Stone and Higher Learning: Reading and Writing About College, and essays in the anthology Five Years of Fourth Genre and in the textbook The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction. His book Saturday Night in Baoding: A China Memoir, winner of the AWP Award for Nonfiction in 1988, has been re-released by the U. of Tampa Press.ANN BOLDT has accepted a tenure track position teaching developmental writing at Pine Technical College.
CANDACE BLACK has had poems published recently in Harpur Palate, The Alembic, Midwest Living and Jabberwock Review. She also had a creative nonfiction piece, “Professional Vet,” published recently in the Fall issue of War, Literature and the Arts.
ERIC BRAUN is a 2005 winner in the Mentor Series, sponsored by The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He and others will study with various writers visiting The Loft during the year, and he will read with poet Lynn Emanuel in June 2006.
JENNIFER DAHLEN has accepted a full-time position with Northland Community and Technical College in East Grand Forks, MN.
KASSIE DUTHIE'S story “Water Sounds Like Water” tied for second place in The Main Street Rag's 2005 fiction contest and will be published in its short fiction anthology.
MELISSA GISH has been selected to receive the 2005 New Mexico State University Donald C. Roush Award for Teaching Excellence. The award is the result of a vote by all the students at NMSU-C.
Recent graduate GWEN HART has accepted a position as Assistant Composition Director at Ohio University for next year. Gwen is a second-year PhD student in the rhetoric and composition program at OU. She recently won Ledge Press’s 11th annual Poetry Chapbook Competition for Dating the Invisible Man. A full-length book, Lost and Found, is due out soon.
NICK HEALY is the 2005 winner of the Speakeasy Prize, sponsored by The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. He will receive $1000, and his piece will appear in a future issue of SPEAKEASY magazine. His “And Other Delights” won the fiction prize, judged by Amy Bloom, and was selected from among several hundred submissions from around the country.
NICOLE HELGET’S Summer of Ordinary Ways received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and was recently chosen for a Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Award. Her story “The Turtle Catcher” won Minnesota Monthly’s Tamarack Award.
BLAKE HOENA has accepted the position of managing editor/production manager for Stone Arch Books.
ALEXANDRA LaFAYE’S novel Worth has won The Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, The California Book Award for Young Adult Literature, a Distinguished Work of Historical Fiction award from the Children's Literature Council of Southern California, and was a Spur Finalist from the Western Writers of America.
THOMAS MALTMAN'S essay “The Search for Cedar Mountain” was a runner-up in The Georgetown Review's writing-on-vocation contest and will appear in the spring issue. Another essay, “Famine,” has been accepted for Rock & Sling. His novel The Night Birds was a finalist in the Dana Awards for best novel. The opening section of the book also received an honorable mention in The Eugene Walter Writer's Fest. A poem “Ghost Town” was accepted by Main Channel Voices. He recently accepted a faculty position at Silver Lake College in Wisconsin.
MATTHEW MAUCH, a 1998 MFA, recently accepted a faculty position at Concordia University St. Paul.
DODIE MILLER, current MFA student, has had a paper—”Of Lovecats and Japanese Babies: How The Cure and the Music Video Age Create Cultural Salience for Surrealism”—accepted for the Southwest Popular Culture Conference.
KRISTIN DODGE NARJES will teach 2-3 online composition classes with Southwest Minnesota State University for Spring 2006. She also has optioned her first romance chick lit novel to St. Martin's Press.
JOSH OLSEN, who graduated last spring, is now teaching part-time at Wayne State University and the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
RICHARD ROBBINS has recent poems in Another Chicago Review, Freshwater, Natural Bridge, New Orleans Review, and On the Wing: American Poems of Air and Space Flight.
Current MFA candidate TRISHA SHASKAN has sold her first book, The Map, to Picture Window Books, which has scheduled it to come out in Fall 2006. She has also been contracted to write three more easy readers—all of them, like the first, children's fiction.
2001 alumna LISA MB SIMONS has published an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress The Missing Man. It can be found online at www.biguglyreview.com.
RICHARD TERRILL has an essay in the summer issue of Brevity magazine, on line at http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/index.htm.CANDACE BLACK gave readings and/or presentations this fall at the U.S. Naval Academy, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the November meeting of the Southern Minnesota Poetry Society.
MELISSA GISH, in her first year at New Mexico State University at Carlsbad, was named Teacher of the Year.
Recent graduate GWEN HART has had a book of poems accepted for publication by David Robert Books. She has recent work forthcoming in MARGIE, Lake Effect, The Village Rambler, and The Neovictorian. Her poem in last spring's Blue Earth Review has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
RYAN HAVELY'S “Armistice” appears in the next issue of Pebble Lake Review.
NICK HEALY has had a story accepted for The Georgetown Review. He is a 2005 recipient of an individual artist grant from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, and the 2005 recipient of a Toy Wilson Blethen Fine Arts Award from MSU.
NICOLE HELGET had sold a manuscript of essays to the Minnesota State Historical Society Press. Her book will appear in Fall 2005.
ERIC HOFFHEISER won an award for best presentation for the creative writing session “Moving On” at MSU’s Undergraduate Research Conference, April 25, 2005.
Alumnus MICHAEL LØHRE published the short story “Bullheads” in the April 2005 edition of The Atlantic Monthly.
Recent graduate CASEY LORD has been offered a position with Pearson Educational Measurement in Iowa City.
THOMAS MALTMAN will have a poem in the next Great River Review.
JENNY MARKS has a poem scheduled for the Fall 2005 issue of Great River Review.
MICHAEL O’HEARN has had a story taken by Greensboro Review.
CHRISTINA OLSON will have new poetry in a forthcoming Mid-American Review.
CHRIS STARK had the prose poem “School,” published in La Primavera and another poem in Talking Sticks, as well as an essay in Off Our Backs. Her article “Stripping as a System of Prostitution,” has been accepted for Prostitution and Pornography: Philosophical Debate about the Sex Industry in the U.S., to be published by Stanford University Press. The article “Sister Oppressions” has been accepted by The Journal of Trauma Practice, and another essay will be published in the anthology Revolution She Wrote. The anthology she co-edited, Not For Sale: Feminists Resisting Prostitution and Pornography, was just published by Spinifex Press.
NATHAN WARDINSKI had the article “All American Messiah: Messiahs of American Pop Culture from Superman to The Passion” published in the October issue of Generation X National Journal.Garrison Keillor read CANDACE BLACK'S poem “Chickadees in the Hawthorn Tree” (from her book The Volunteer) on the Wednesday, September 1 edition of NPR's “Writer's Almanac.” The program is distributed to nearly 300 public radio stations nationwide. The program audio is streamed and archived on the Minnesota Public Radio web site: writersalmanac.publicradio.org.
Recent MFA graduate JESSICA GUNDERSON has accepted a teaching job at Madison Technical College in Wisconsin.
MFA student NICOLE HELGET won the Speakeasy Prize for Prose, sponsored by The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She will receive $1,000 for First Place—out of 500 entries—and her piece will appear in Speakeasy magazine in November.
Recent MFA graduate CASEY HICKMAN now teaches at Muscatine Community College in eastern Iowa. She will be teaching a Humanities class called Changes & Choices and an Advanced English Composition course. She recently had a poem taken in Midwest Quarterly Review.
Undergraduate CW major AMANDA NIGON’S creative piece, first presented in last spring’s Undergraduate Research Conference, was accepted for the URC Journal, now available online at http://www.mnsu.edu/research/URC/OnlinePublications/onlinejournal.htm.
Recent MFA graduate ANDREA POTYONDY-SMITH has accepted a full-time instructorship at Hennepin Technical College.
CHRIS STARK has accepted a position at Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Moorhead.
MFA graduate JILL WEINGARTZ has accepted a senior editor position at Picture Window Books.
Spring MFA graduate MARIANNE ZARZANA has been offered a full-time fixed-term position at Southwest Minnesota State University as an assistant professor for 2004-2005. She will teach composition, print journalism, and public relations.MELISSA GISH has accepted a tenure-track position at New Mexico State University in Carlsbad, beginning this fall.
TARA MOGHADAM’S chapbook version of 1000 White Taras won the Edda Poetry Prize for women (Sarasota Poetry Theater Press).
DEBORAH SELBACH has been awarded a Prairie Lakes Arts Council/McKnight Foundation grant of $1000 to complete BAD FAMILY, a novel told in story form. She has also accepted a full-time faculty position at Riverland Community and Technical College, Owatonna campus.
BILL SOLLER works in the Office of the Governor for the State of Montana and teaches adjunct at the University of Montana’s Helena campus.
RICHARD TERRILL won the 2004 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry for his book Coming Late to Rachmaninoff (U of Tampa Press).
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