ANNOUNCEMENTS

It’s Boston Poetry Marathon time again! This year’s Boston Poetry Marathon is Friday-Sunday, August 16, 17, and 18, and …WE HAVE REALLY EXCITING NEWS! *We will be in a NEW LOCATION this year!* We are having this year’s Marathon at The Community Church of Boston at 565 Boylston St in Copley Square. This year’s event times are Friday, August 16th, from 6:00-10:30 p.m., Saturday, August 17th, from 12:00-10:30 p.m. (with a dinner break around 5:30, starting up again at 7:00 p.m.), and Sunday, August 18th, from 12:00-6:00 p.m. As always: every reader gets eight minutes each. For the third year running, Bridget Eileen (Poetry, W’09) is an organizer of this 20+ year-old Boston-area poetry festival tradition. This year’s lineup is TBD, but past years’ Stonecoast participants include alums Florine Melnyk, Carol Berg, Christine Tierney, and Vanesa Pacheco, and faculty Richard Hoffman and D. Nurkse. Admission is free but donations are welcome and appreciated. We are collecting donations ahead of time to help us with this year’s event at the new location. Learn more here. Event details are can be found here.

FACULTY

Breena Clarke (Fiction), co-founder and co-organizer of The Hobart Festival of Women Writers, is hosting a stunning lineup of women writers for the seventh consecutive year in the small New York town of Hobart, the Book Village of The Catskills. The Festival offers three days of readings and workshops in every genre. The Festival will also present a Public Conversation that is free and open to all, “In These Times: Writing. Terror. Possibility.” Hobart Festival of Women Writers 2019 will be held on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, September 6th, 7th, & 8th. For information and registration, click here. For Spotlights of all of the 2019 Participating Writers, go here.

Aaron Hamburger (Fiction, Creative Nonfiction) will be reading from his novel Nirvana Is Here at the annual Out Write Literary Festival in Washington, DC, Saturday, August 3rd, from 1:00-2:00 p.m. at the Reeves Center at 14th St. NW and U St. Aaron is also please to announce that the audio rights to Nirvana Is Here have just been sold.

Elizabeth Hand (Popular Fiction, Fiction) was an instructor at The Writers Hotel in New York City in early June and then later in the month was lead instructor at the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle. Her forthcoming novel Curious Toys was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, which called it “a phantasmagoric time trip tailor made for fans of The Devil in the White City.” Recent reviews are Kate Mosse’s The Burning Chambers for The Washington Post and Paul Tremblay’s story collection Growing Things for The Los Angeles Times. Elizabeth was profiled and interviewed by Michael Fournier in punk zine Razorcake, talking about her involvement in the nascent NYC and DC punk scenes in the 1970s.

Elizabeth Searle’s (Fiction, Playwriting, Popular Fiction, Scriptwriting) feature film script A Four-Sided Bed, and the short film based on her novel, Four-Sided, have both been accepted at the upcoming Massachusetts Independent Film Festival in September. Elizabeth’s script is one of five finalists for Best Feature Film Script and the film Four-Sided will make its USA premiere at the festival, having screened previously in Cannes and been a Finalist at ShanghaiPRIDE festival. Elizabeth will be attending the festival with one of her feature film project producers, Amy Carpenter Scott of Creatrix Films. In other recent film news, Elizabeth’s script for A Four-Sided Bed won a Feature Film ‘Diamond’ Script prize in the International Independent Film Awards, was a Finalist in the California Women’s Film Awards, and was an Official Selection at Austin Revolution Film Festival. In July, her script was performed as a full Staged Reading at ReelHeART International Film and Script Festival in Toronto and as a Best Scenes reading at the film festival LGBT Toronto. Visit: www.afoursidedbedfilm.com 

Cazenovia University Professor Grazyna J. Kozaczka writes about Suzanne Strempek Shea’s (Creative Nonfiction, Fiction) four Polish-American-set novels in her new book, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction (Ohio University Press). The book examines seven decades of writing by North American-born and immigrant authors representing the Polish-American Catholic tradition. The chapter “Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Gendered Ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s” begins with this observation: “In constructing a female perspective, fiction writers such as the Chinese Americans Gish Jen, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan, the Native American Louise Erdrich,the Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer, the Dominican American Julia Alvarerz and the Polish American Suzanne Strempek Shea have forced many of their characters into a process of reinventing both their gender and ethnic identities within a class-conscious environment.”

ALUMS

Emma Galvin will be voicing the audiobook for Lindsey Barlow‘s (Popular Fiction, W’19) Pivot, the first novel of the Jack Harper trilogy. Galvin has voiced an incredible number of audiobooks, which include Winter’s Bone and the Divergent series.

Peter Adrian Behravesh (Popular Fiction, W’18) will be appearing at Worldcon 77 in Dublin. He will be presenting his paper “Mischief in Her Heart: Women’s Empowerment in the Persian Fantastic” on Friday, August 16th, at 11:30 a.m. He will also be appearing on the following panels:

• Writing from Non-Western Cultures (Thursday, August 15, 11:00 a.m.)
• Fuzzy Lines: Decategorising Creative Work (Thursday, August 15, 2:00 p.m.)
• Muslim SFF (Saturday, August 17, 1:00 p.m.)
• Using Science in Fantasy Writing (Sunday, August 18, 4:00 p.m.)

See the Worldcon website for full details. In addition, PodCastle, the fantasy fiction podcast Peter produces, had been nominated for the British Fantasy Award for Best Audio.Ryan Brod (Creative Nonfiction, S’17) has accepted an adjunct teaching offer from University of New England’s English department, starting this fall. He has a short essay in the recently released summer issue (10.4) of The Flyfish Journal, and he continues to contribute regularly to the popular website MeatEater.

In continuing to break barriers, Debbie Smith Daughetee’s (Popular Fiction, S’06) comic book company, Kymera Press, just filled an order by the Smithsonian National Natural History Museum for the comic Ivory Ghosts, a murder mystery set against the illegal ivory trade.

Renee S. DeCamillis (Popular Fiction, W’14) is excited to announce that her debut book, The Bone Cutters, is set for publication on September 1st through Eraserhead Press. It’s a “bizarro” horror novella set in a dysfunctional psychiatric hospital. The story follows a troubled young woman named Dory who encounters a seriously strange and brutal group of psychiatric patients. Her introduction to this group of patients sets Dory on the run to save her life. The book will be available, as of right now, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Longfellow Books. Renee is also very excited to announce that a book launch event for The Bone Cutters is being hosted by Longfellow Books in Portland, ME, on Thursday, September 5th at 7:00 p.m. at their 1 Monument Square bookstore location. Along with her reading, there will also be live music to help set the mood, performed by local guitarist Shaun Church Reehl, and the amazing Elizabeth Searle will be Renee’s Introduction Queen. Renee is also thrilled to announce that there are two great reviews out already for The Bone Cutters: one on Ginger Nuts of Horror and one on Kendall Reviews. A third review is coming out soon in Cemetery Dance, the date of which is not yet known, though it should be available before the September 1st publication of the book. Here are snippets of what reviewers are saying about The Bone Cutters:

“It’s actually refreshing to be able to enjoy a book so much that you were miffed when it was over. … As the debut novella from Renee S. DeCamillis it’s a fantastic beginning to what could prove to be a career to watch. … I’m giving this a solid 4 out of 5 [stars]. … Considering that I’ve never read anything which rated a 5 I think The Bone Cutters is doing just fine.” ~Joe X. Young, reviewer for Ginger Nuts of Horror.

“I immediately fell in love with Dory, the writing style, the story… This is a terribly heart-wrenching story with a bit of a haunted house/ghost vibe where you’re also being chased by a bunch of crazy people who want to devour your bones. I didn’t want to put this book down.” ~Miranda Crites, reviewer for Kendall Reviews

Kendall Reviews also published a piece Renee wrote on the subject of “Why Do You Write Horror?” For those of you who are interested, here is the link. Also, on Friday, August 2nd, Ginger Nuts of Horror is releasing an interview with Renee. From their home page you can click on the “Interviews” link on the left hand side of the screen to find the interview. Here is their link.

Jess Flarity (Popular Fiction, S’18) has published his academic essay “The Commodification of Transcendence: Absurdism and Existentialism in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” in PKD Otaku #39 (a zine celebrating the work of Philip K. Dick), available here. Also, Jess has accepted an advancement from the University of New Hampshire and will now be attending graduate school as a candidate for a PhD in Literature.

Florence Grende‘s (Creative Nonfiction, S’07) book The Butcher’s Daughter: A Memoir has been shortlisted for the Rubery Book Award (2019). Along with the Kindle Book Award NonFiction (2018), the book has garnered yearly awards since its publication in late 2016.

Clifford Royal Johns (Popular Fiction, W’18) will be giving a short presentation at HippoCamp 2019, a conference for creative nonfiction writers (August 23-25, Lancaster, PA). The presentation is derived from his third semester project and graduating presentation about reducing the number of sentences that start with “I.” This is important to avoid sounding egotistical in memoir and to reduce sentence structure repetition.

Veda Boyd Jones (Fiction, S’17) will be speaking at the White County Creative Writers annual conference in Searcy, AR, on August 31st on “Researching Fiction.” She’ll use examples from her work: attending the citizen’s police academy for a policewoman character, spending two days at a TV station watching the news being put together for a news anchor character, going behind the bar to wash beer mugs for a bartender character, etc.

Lissa Kiernan (Poetry, S11) is pleased to announce that the legendary aerialist, creativity expert, and award-winning writer Philippe Petit has joined Catskill LIT Writing Retreat as Artist-in-Residence. Mr. Petit will lead a workshop in ekphrastic writing.

Cynthia Kraack (Fiction, W’10) and Joseph Tachovsky’s 40 Thieves: Saipan, the World War II story of the Sixth Marine Regiment’s Scout Sniper Platoon—precursors to Navy Seals—was sold to Regnery History for publication in spring 2020. Stories for this narrative non-fiction book were gathered through hours of interviews with surviving men, their letters, photos, and historical Marine materials.

Kristin Leonard‘s (Fiction, S’18) historical short story “El Camino Real” is the featured fiction in the open-access academic journal Postcolonial Text (Vol. 14, No. 1).

Ellen Meeropol (Fiction, W’06) will be presenting at the Hobart Festival of Women Writers September 6-8, 2019, in Hobart, NY. She’ll be reading on Friday, September 6th; on Saturday she’ll teach a workshop, “In It for the Long Haul: Writing the Novel.”

Catharine H. Murray (Creative Nonfiction, S’17) will be teaching a workshop on Memoir at the 79th Annual Writers’ Conference at Ocean Park (Maine) on August 13th at 9:30 a.m.

On August 16th at 6:00 p.m., Dave Patterson (Fiction, W’13) discusses his novel, Soon the Light Will Be Perfect, at The Briar Patch in Bangor.

Lisa Romeo (Creative Nonfiction S’08) interviewed fiction writer Lisa Lenzo for The Rumpus, about Lenzo’s new short story collection, Unblinking. Romeo’s essay “Playing Along with My Dad’s Alzheimer’s Confusion,” which enlarges on a scene/idea in her memoir, Starting With Goodbye, appeared this month in Human Parts.

Gina Troisi‘s (Creative Nonfiction, W’09) essay “Buried Beneath Her Skin Like Slivers” was recently published in Under the Sun. Her flash essay “The Release” was published in the most recent issue of Pembroke Magazine. Her short story “Spiraling Through the Sky” was a finalist for the 2019 New Letters Publication Award in Fiction.

Marco Wilkinson (Creative Nonfiction, S’13) has had his memoir/essay collection, Madder, taken by Coffee House Press. It will appear in 2021.