Congratulations to the Stonecoast Summer 2013 graduates: Katie Bickham, Sheila Boneham, Karen Bovenmyer, Katie Crumpton, Heather Ann Cyr, Kerri Dieffenwierth, Katrina Ellyson, Kelli Faherty, Edward Ferrara, Karla Michelle Fossett, Yvonne (Rooze) Garcia, Alexandria Giardino, Terri Glass, Penny Guisinger, Andrew Heckler, Sarah Steinberg Heller, Michael L. Joy, Thomas Morrissey, Casey Moynihan, Meaghan Reynolds, Katherine Sargent, Chuck Smithson, Bonnie Stufflebeam, Andrew Wales, and Marco Wilkinson!

(Thanks to Michael L. Joy for supplying the list)

STONECOAST ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

From SCAA President Mihku Paul:

At the annual SCAA meeting on July 22nd, live elections were held to fill empty Board seats. I am happy to report that we have nearly a full complement of Board members at this time [the line-up is listed below]. Our thanks to those who have served and are stepping down, and welcome to new Board members. We are eager to grow the organization and continue planning events and activities that highlight the skills and achievements of all Stonecoast alumni. We encourage all Stonecoast alumni to stay connected, informed, and involved. To that end, Board member emails are listed here as well.

President: Mihku Paul S’10 (F) 2013-2015 – mikhupaul@gmail.com
Vice President: Mike Langworthy W’11 (CNF) July 2013-July 2014 *special 1 yr term to fill vacancy – mikelangworthy4@gmail.com
Treasurer: Position is unfilled at the moment due to the Maine residency requirement. Suggestions are welcome, as are volunteers.
Secretary: Jessica DeKoninck (P) July 2012-July 2014 – jessica.dekoninck@verizon.net
Director: Patricia Barletta W’12 (PF) July 2013-July 2015 – plb.author@verizon.net
Director: Adam K. Gallardo S’12 (PF) July 2012-July 2014 – adamkretuzgallardo@gmail.com
Director: Michael Joy S’13 (PF) July 2013-July 2015 – Privateer_nh@hotmail.com
Director: Kathleen Saville W’13 July 2013-July 2015 – ksaville@aucegypt.edu
Director: Andy Wales *special 1-year term to fill vacancy – andrew.wales@maine.edu
Amy Martin **co-signatory to Treasurer (Maine resident)

ALUMNI

Michael Beeman (Fiction, S’09) was happy to see his post about incredibly late movie sequels published on Esquire.com. You can read the article here.

Sheila Boneham (Creative Nonfiction/Cross Genre, S’13) has been invited to judge nonfiction books in the Cat Writers’ Association (CWA) annual international writing contest. This year her debut mystery, Drop Dead on Recall, has been nominated in the fiction category in the CWA contest and the annual writing contest of the Dog Writers Association of America. CWA and DWAA are organizations of professionals writing, publishing and broadcasting about cats and dogs, respectively. Three of Sheila’s nonfiction books have won Awards of Excellence, and two of those were names Best Care & Health Books, in the CWA contest in past years, and six of her nonfiction books have won best book awards or been finalists in past DWAA contests.

Karen Bovenmyer (Popular Fiction, S’13) is excited to announce her science fiction horror novella “Failsafe” will be published August 14, 2013, in The Crimson Pact, Volume 5 anthology edited by Paul Genesse. The anthology will debut at GenCon Indy and also feature Writing Excuses’ Dan Wells, Xena and Hercules’ George Strayton, Seton Hill’s Lawrence Connolly, and New York Times Bestseller Larry Correia among its pages. Karen read from “Failsafe” as her graduate reading and couldn’t be more thrilled to appear in CP5 with a host of 22 awesome authors’ scary stories!

Jennifer Marie Brissett (Popular Fiction, S’11) signed the contract for her first book deal for the novel Elysium, which is due to be released from Aqueduct Press in Spring 2014! Elysium was her Stonecoast thesis, so many thanks to her beyond-awesome mentors, Jim Kelly, David Durham, Ted Deppe, and Elizabeth Hand. Thanks also to her amazing agent Kris O’Higgins from Scribe Agency, LLC. Also, she just returned from the Launch Pad Writers Workshop in Wyoming (Jamie Todd Rubin did a nice write-up of all the lovely folks where were there).

Florence Grende‘s (Creative Nonfiction, S’07) manuscript, Out of Silence, has been chosen as a finalist in the Autumn House Press nonfiction book contest, to be judged by Phillip Lopate.

Tamie Fields Harkins (Creative Nonfiction, S’12) just finished teaching her first undergraduate college class ever! The students were thoughtful, funny, receptive, and engaged, and took every ounce of her strength, energy, and time. She’s looking forward to the coming semester!

Formally announced at ALA last month, Lexa Hillyer‘s (Poetry, S’10) debut poetry book, Acquainted with the Cold, won the Foreword Book of the Year Award. The publisher’s press release can be found here. On a separate note, Hillyer would also like to announce an intensive full-day seminar for Young Adult and Middle Grade writers hosted by Paper Lantern Lit in Brooklyn, NY, on October 12, 2013. For information or to register, click here.

Jeff Kass (Fiction, S’09) had his first full-length poetry collection, My Beautiful Hook-nosed Beauty Queen Strut-wave, accepted for publication by Dzanc Books. Look for it in fall of 2014. In addition, Jeff has a poem, “Everybody will talk about the 30-footer Trey Burke knocked down to tie Kansas,” in the current issue of Midwestern Gothic. Finally, Jeff and his students at Ann Arbor’s Teen Center The Neutral Zone’s independent publishing company Red Beard Press have just completed editing Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living, which they are billing as the “ultimate collection of contemporary poems for classroom use.” The book includes poems from such luminaries as Naomi Shihab Nye, Kim Addonizio, Matín Espada, Marge Piercy, Aracelis Girmay, Patrick Rosal, Ross Gay, and former and present Stonecoast instructors Patricia Smith, Tim Seibles, and Lesléa Newman as well as Stonecoast alums Karrie Warrala and Theresa Scollon. Class sets will be available for teachers at a discount price along with a companion Teacher’s Guide authored by Jeff. Look for it in September!

Alan King (Poetry, W’13) is now a visiting writer for PEN/Faulkner’s Writers in Schools, a literary arts outreach program that purchases and makes available for free copies of contemporary works of literature to participating DC schools. The Foundation also arranges for the authors of those works to visit classrooms and discuss literature and the writing life. King is currently visiting and discussing his first collection, Drift.

The first season of Spun Out, a situation comedy for CTV, on which Mike Langworthy (Creative Nonfiction, W’11) was a creative consultant, wrapped on Friday, July 19th. The final episode reunited Spun Out star David Foley with the legendary Canadian sketch-comedy group The Kids in the Hall, of which Foley is a founding member. Other guest stars have included Will Sasso (MADtv, Less Than Perfect) and Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica). Spun Out is the first multi-camera situation comedy shot in front of a live audience in Toronto in over 20 years and is scheduled to air on CTV and internationally beginning in January 2014.

Sandra McDonald (Popular Fiction, ’05) was invited to tour NASA Johnson Space Center along with other social media writers, reporters, and space program fans. Their group visited Mission Control for the International Space Station (ISS) and met astronaut Mike Hopkins (pictured below with Sandra), who will be going to ISS via Soyuz in September. Sandra’s currently working on a short story called “Murder on the Space Station.” Follow @sandramcdonald and @NASASocial for more information.

Laura Navarre (Popular Fiction, W’11) is thrilled to announce that Midsummer Magick, Book Two in her award-winning historical fantasy Magick Trilogy, comes out from Harlequin/Carina on August 12. The Magick Trilogy brings Faeries, fallen angel heroes, and figures from Arthurian legend to Tudor England. Midsummer Magick is Laura’s sixth published novel. Spread the magick here!

Bruce Pratt‘s (Fiction, ’04) short story “Saturday Night Lights” will appear in the September issue of Portland Magazine.

Linda K. Sienkiewicz (Fiction, S’09) was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Springfed Arts 2013 Writing Contest for her short story “The Right Thing.” She will be reading with the other winners at the Springfed Writers and Music Series in Birmingham, MI, on August 12.

Ashley Warren‘s (Fiction, S’12) short story “An Exhibition of Human Bodies” has been accepted by Moon Hollow Press for inclusion in the forthcoming anthology Uneasy Bones: Dark Works by Women.

STUDENTS

Alexis Paige (Creative Nonfiction) recently published the essay “Playing By the Rules: White Privilege and Rachel Jeantel.” It appeared on The Rumpus on July 1st; this is her second piece featured there.

FACULTY

David Anthony Durham‘s (Fiction, Popular Fiction) Acacia Trilogy continues to roll out in Portugal. The fourth volume (which is actually the second half of the second novel) is called O Povo Das Criancas Divinas. Also, George R. R. Martin and Tor have accepted David’s multi-part story, “Those About to Die,” for inclusion in the next Wild Cards mosaic novel, Lowball. It’s due out sometime in 2014.

Aaron Hamburger (Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Popular Fiction) has a review scheduled to appear in The New York Times Book Review on August 11th. He’s also appearing at the Outwrite Book Festival in Washington, DC, where on August 3rd he’ll give a reading and lead a workshop.

Elizabeth Hand (Fiction, Popular Fiction) was an instructor at Clarion West in Seattle this summer. In September she’ll be reading/signing at Forbidden Planet in London and interviewing Nijinsky biographer Lucy Moore as part of Uppsala, Sweden’s Culture Night, then appearing in Helsinki and at the Turku Book Fair to promote the Finnish editions of Generation Loss and Available Dark.

Jim Kelly (Popular Fiction) has sold “The Promise of Space,” a short story, to the online magazine Clarkesworld; it is scheduled for publication later this year. Jim also resold his novelette “Declaration” to Asimov’s Science Fiction. It was originally published in audio only on Audible.com as part of the Science Fiction Writers of America’s anthology Rip-Off, edited by Gardner Dozois. Its appearance in Asimov’s will be its first print incarnation.

On August 3rd, Elizabeth Searle (Fiction, Popular Fiction, Scriptwriting) will attend the Awards Ceremony at the Woods Hole International Film Festival on Cape Cod, where her screenplay, A Four-Sided Bed, is a finalist in the Best Feature Film Script competition. On August 7th at 7:00 p.m., the New England Institute of Art bookstore in Brookline, MA, presents A Midsummer Reading, featuring Elizabeth, Jessica Gozek, Stephen Burt, Ben Mazer, Fred Marchant, Elizabeth McConnell, Peter Richards, and Tom Yuill.