ANNOUNCEMENTS

ALUMNI RESIDENCY WORKSHOP: A CROSS-GENRE WORKSHOP IN FICTION AND CREATIVE NONFICTION

This January, Stonecoast is offering a personalized writing experience for our Alumni.  Held in conjunction with the Stonecoast winter residency, Susan Conley will lead workshops that get alums to immerse in their writing within a peer setting again. Participants will generate new work as well as discuss old work. It is our hope that you will get to see your writing from new vantage points and that you’ll leave the residency feeling inspired. The conference fee includes four 2.5 hour workshop sessions, plus full access to all presentations, seminars, readings, pop-up classes, reception, and special events. You’ll also get a one-on-one meeting with New York agent Stephanie Koven.

• Dates: January 10-January 14, 2020
• Cost: $650.00 workshop fee, plus room and board (~$750 for 4 nights) or commuter fee ($285). Includes daily lunches and afternoon tea at the Harraseeket Inn.
• Contact Jenny O’Connell to reserve your spot! There are only 8 slots available, and we expect this workshop to fill quickly.

STONECOAST AT AWP

Do you plan on attending the 2020 AWP conference (March 4-7) in San Antonio? Contact Special Programs Coordinator Jenny O’Connell to be added to the list of attending Stonecoasters! As part of the new Stonecoast WISE (Writing for Inclusion and Social Equity) Initiative, all Stonecoast students, alumni, and faculty are invited to a WISE reading and discussion in San Antonio. Time and location TBD. We hope to see you there!

FACULTY

Tom Coash’s (Scriptwriting) play Thin Air has recently been published by Brooklyn Publishers. His play Raghead will be produced in Bronx, NY, as part of the Urban Waves Festival by the Open Hydrant Theater Company, November 11-17.

John Florio (Creative Nonfiction, Popular Fiction, Writing for Social Change) writes about sports, crime, and social issues. In October, he wrote a feature for ESPN’s The Undefeated: Red Sox’s Raquel Ferreira Breaks Through Baseball’s Glass Ceiling. He also recently signed a two-book YA deal with Macmillan Children’s Group. The first will tell the controversial story of Sacco & Vanzetti, two Italian anarchists wrongly convicted of murder and later executed in Boston, MA.

Aaron Hamburger (Fiction, Creative Nonfiction) has been awarded an arts and humanities fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities for 2020. The award, which supports individual artists who achieve excellence in the arts, was given on the basis of several selections from Aaron’s novel Nirvana Is Here. Also, Aaron will be presenting Nirvana Is Here at the National Press Club Book Fair on November 1st in Washington, DC.

Elizabeth Hand’s (Popular Fiction, Fiction) novel Curious Toys has received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Review of Books, and CrimeReads, among others, and was named one of the Ten Books You Must Read Now by Oprah Magazine.

Jim Kelly (Popular Fiction emeritus) has been active in his retirement from Stonecoast. His short story “Selfless” appears in the current issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is featured in the Asimov’s Spotlight podcast in which Jim reads the story in its entirety. His novelette “Grace’s Family” was published last month in The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019 Edition. A new standalone novella, King of the Dogs, Queen of the Cats, is forthcoming in January from Subterranean Press in print  and Blackstone Publishing in audio. The novelette “The Boyfriend Experience” will be published in the Twelve Tomorrows anthology from M.I.T. Press this summer, and the story “The Man I Love” is slated for later in 2020 in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. When you read this, Jim will be in in Beijing as a guest of the Chinese government at the fourth annual China Science Fiction Conference (November 2-3), where he will give a presentation on teaching science fiction writers at Stonecoast and other programs.

Robert Levy’s (Popular Fiction) ghost story “The Vault of the Sky, the Face of the Deep” is included in Come Join Us By the Fire, a free audio anthology to celebrate the launch of Nightfire, a new horror imprint from Tor Books. More information about the anthology and the imprint can be found here.

Elizabeth Searle (Fiction, Playwriting, Popular Fiction, Scriptwriting) and A Four-Sided Bed, her script in development as a feature film, were featured in the October issue of Imagine Magazine, a longtime publication for the New England Film Community. In other film news: Four-Sided, the short film based on Elizabeth’s novel, won Best Experimental Short and second place as Best Narrative Short in Vegas Movie Awards, and the short film is a Semi-Finalist at Blow-Up: The International Art-House Film Fest, along with having screenings upcoming at festivals in Pittsburgh and Chicago. Elizabeth’s feature script A Four-Sided Bed won Best Dramatic Screenplay at Vegas Movie Awards and was selected for a Best Scenes short reading at the Romance Film Festival.

 

ALUMS

Peter Adrian Behravesh (Popular Fiction, W’18) has accepted a full-time position as an editor for Seven Seas Entertainment, the #1 independently owned manga publisher in North America. He will be at the World Fantasy Convention in L.A. from October 31st to November 3rd, where he will moderate the “Mixing Genres” panel (Friday, November 1st, at 1:00 p.m.) and appear on the “Beyond Castles, Horses and Knights: Non-Eurocentric Fantasy” panel (Saturday, November 2nd, at 12:00 p.m.).

Nancy Holder (Popular Fiction faculty) and Debbie Lynn Smith Daughetee (Popular Fiction, S’04) would like to announce that Kymera Press is launching a Kickstarter in January 2020 for their title Mary Shelley Presents. The Kickstarter is to fund the printing of a trade paperback of all four issues (Nancy is the author and Debbie is the publisher). We hope you’ll help support us bringing back the voices of Victorian women horror writers in a unique and artful way.

Jess Flarity (Popular Fiction, S’18) has been accepted to present a paper on space Jesuits at this year’s Northeast Modern Language Association conference in Boston (NeMLA). The paper is titled “Glory to the Machine God: Tech-priests as Future Jesuits in the Warhammer 40k Universe” and might be included as part of his PhD thesis on the intersection of science fiction and philosophy. Space Jesuits and Habermas! What a time to be alive.

Zachary Jernigan (Popular Fiction, W’11) has sold History of the Defeated, a novella, to LGBTQ+-focused publisher Lethe Press. In creative-adjacent news, he’ll also be appearing on the live taping of Nicole Byer’s (Netflix’s Nailed It!) podcast Why Won’t You Date Me? on November 14th at Tempe Improv in Tempe, AZ. Zack can be found on Twitter at @CriticalJams.

Clifford Royal Johns (Popular Fiction, W’18) will be on the schedule for Windycon, a Chicago area SF convention (November 15-17), as follows:

• Panel: Commerce in Space Opera — Friday, November 15th, 6:00-7:00 p.m. in Mueller Grand Ballroom G
• Panel: Ask a Scientist — Saturday, November 16th, 1:00-2:00 p.m. in Lilac C
• Chicago-SF Book discussion: Ringworld by Larry Niven — Saturday, November 16th, 3:00-4:00 p.m. in ISFiC Suite – Room 1612
• Writers Workshop Moderator: Sunday — Sunday, November 17th, 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. in ISFiC Suite – Room 1612
• Panel: Memorable Space Opera Settings — Sunday, November 17th, 1:00-2:00 p.m. in Mueller Grand Ballroom H

Veda Boyd Jones (Fiction, S’17) has several articles in the 2020 Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac on newsstands now. This year’s Christmas romance novella, The Christmas Parade, is now available on Amazon. Favorable reviews welcome. 🙂

Teacher/Pizza Guy, the new poetry collection by Jeff Kass (Fiction, S’09), was recently reviewed by The Ann Arbor Observer. Jeff will be reading on Wednesday, November 6th, at Nicola’s Books in Ann Arbor, MI, and on Wednesday, December 5th, at The White Plains Public Library in White Plains, NY.

Alan King (Poetry, W’13) is looking for reviewers for his audiobook Drift, now available on Audible. He has promo codes for review copies (US and UK). Those interested should contact him at alanw.king@gmail.com. Please add “DRIFT Audiobook Review” in the subject line.

Tom MacDonald‘s (Fiction, W’09) short story “Nashua River Floater” will be published next June in Coast to Coast Noir, a crime anthology edited by Paul D. Marks and Andrew McAleer.

Ellie O’Leary (Poetry W’17) has a poem “We Were a Family of Five When I Coughed” in the anthology The Hands We Hold: Poetry Concerning Breast Cancer.

Suri Parmar‘s (Popular Fiction, W’17) short film Skin Deep, based on her screenplay and directed by Ryan Couldrey, recently won second prize at Port Horror Festival’s short film showcase. Her short film Rialia also premiered at the CineFAM Film Festival, and her short script Vomit Comet was featured in a live staged reading at Toronto Cold Reads.

For the second year running, Cynthia Furlong Reynolds (Fiction, ‘12) won a journalism award in the annual Writers’ Digest Writing Competition. The first was for “Ginger Takes A Stand: A Life Lived With Polio,” the second “DNA Discoveries: Home Ancestry Tests are Rewriting Family Trees.” (Despite her commitment to finishing the novels she started at Stonecoast, Cynthia still loves writing for magazines.) In addition, Cynthia has had two non-fiction books published recently: The Purple Rose of Chelsea: Jeff Daniels and His Theater and Reach!, a business manual written for meta-franchiser John Rotche.

Two poems, “are you against me Boss” and “it’s dark outside Boss by J. Stephen (Steve) Rhodes (Poetry, W’11), will appear in the forthcoming issue of Christianity and Literature. These poems are part of a new series of psalm-like poems inspired by Maurice Manning’s collection, Bucolics.

Lisa Romeo (Creative Nonfiction, S’08) was recently interviewed by Nonfiction Reads. She’d love to see Stonecoast folks at I AM BOOKS, in Boston, on Saturday, November 9th, at 6:00 p.m., when she’s reading along with (fellow Stonecoast alum) Anthony D’Aires (Creative Nonfiction, W’09) and New Hampshire poet/author Jennifer Militello.

Kathleen Sullivan (Poetry, ’06) has co-edited a book to be published this November by Littoral Books called A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis. The book is an anthology of essays and poems by Maine writers on the topic of the climate catastrophe we are facing and can be purchased online, after November 15th, at Littoralbooks.com. On December 8th at 2:00 p.m. at Space, we will hold a publication party, and Kathleen would like to invite the Stonecoast community. Intended both as a work of art and as a call to action, the hope of the editors is that it wakes people to the enormous potential and already arrived losses a fossil fuel dependent world promises and, in the awakening, that people will be moved by their love for this place we call home to act. Kathleen has also had a poem, “Mrs. C and the Social Worker,” published in Cafe Review‘s Fall 30th Anniversary issue.

Darlene Taylor (Fiction, W’17) received an individual artist grant from the DC Commission on Arts and the Humanities. The merit-based grant supports her work as a literary artist during Fiscal Year 2020.

The Killing Moon, a novel written by Allister Timms (Popular Fiction, ’13) during his time at Stonecoast, was published on Halloween by PS Publishing, the UK’s foremost genre publisher.