ANNOUNCEMENTS

STONECOAST ALUMNI WINTER 2021 SCRIPTWRITING WORKSHOP:
THE NEXT STEP–REHEARSING YOUR SCRIPT!

As part of Stonecoast’s offerings at our January 2021 Virtual MFA Residency, alums are invited to sign up for “The Rehearsal Experience” with Stonecoast MFA faculty member and playwright Tom Coash and guest playwright-director Jeni Mahoney—a 3-day workshop with access to the entire winter residency. More information can be found here.  

A huge part of scriptwriting is learning to collaborate and glean valuable information about your script during the rehearsal process. Being in a room with really smart, talented people, all working together, readying your script for the public is an incredibly inspiring, unique experience. Scriptwriters, in this special, four-session, alumni workshop, will submit a ten-minute play/screenplay and during the course of the workshop will read, discuss, rewrite, and REHEARSE these pieces for an online, post-residency Stonecoast public reading. Taking advantage of the online residency possibilities, we will bring in professional, guest artist actors and directors from all over the country to rehearse each play individually in online breakout rooms. Writers will have one-on-one sessions with their directors, rehearsals with actors/directors, discussion of scripts with workshop members, and opportunities to observe other rehearsals. Come join us and see your script brought to life by some of the best talent in the country. All levels of scriptwriting experience welcome.

This workshop is also open to writers who have not attended Stonecoast. So, please tell your friends. Space is limited, sign up asap!

Workshop Dates: January 7th (one-hour introduction meeting) through January 10th, though participants will have access to the entire residency (January 7-17)
Workshop Time: 1:00-4:00 p.m.
Cost: $1100, or $880 early bird discount for those who sign up before December 11th. A deposit will be required. 
Email Tom Coash for additional information. Email Lindsey Vazquez for questions and registration and to enroll. Space is limited! 

STONECOAST MFA ALUMNI READING SERIES

Join us for the first annual Stonecoast MFA Alumni Reading Series! Over the course of two sessions (December 2nd & December 9th), we’ll hear readings from twelve alumni authors who published a book in 2020. Additional information & RSVP:

Stonecoast MFA 2020 Alumni Reading Part I (December 2nd) featuring Kevin St. Jarre, Cynthia Kraak, Julia McKenzie Munemo, Ellie O’Leary, Anne Britting Oleson, and David Sloan

Stonecoast MFA 2020 Alumni Reading Part II  (December 9th) featuring Brenda Cooper, Terri Glass, Gail Hovey, Ellen Meeropol, Colin W. Sargent, and Joanna Solfrian

CURRENT STUDENTS

Darcie Abbene‘s (Fiction) essay “Go On, Then” was featured as an Editor’s Selection by Emma Bolden in Tupelo Quarterly’s Issue 22. In addition, Darcie’s review of Kingdomtide by Rye Curtis was recently published in Necessary Fiction.

FACULTY

Faith Adiele (Creative Nonfiction) writes about meeting and getting naked with long-lost Finnish family in “A Family Project” in The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Volume 12: True Stories from Around the World, edited by Lavinia Spalding and illustrated by Colette Hannahan.  

JJ Amaworo Wilson‘s (Fiction, Popular Fiction, Writing for Social Change) new novel, Nazaré, will be published by PM Press in Fall 2021. The novel tells the story of a peasants’ revolt, led by a homeless boy and a washerwoman, to topple a dictator.

Martín Espada‘s (Poetry, Writing for Social Change) new book of poems, called Floaters, is forthcoming in January from W.W. Norton. The book is now available for pre-order.

John Florio (Creative Nonfiction, Popular Fiction, Writing for Social Change) wrote his latest piece on civil rights for ESPN’s The Undefeated: Bloody Police Assault on Miles Davis Feels Like it Could Have Happened Yesterday. His next book will be for young adults and is slated for release next year. Doomed: The Tragic Story of Sacco & Vanzetti tells the controversial story of two Italian anarchists convicted of murder and later executed in Boston, MA. 

Aaron Hamburger‘s (Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Writing for Social Change) review of Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s story collection Truthtelling appeared in The New York Journal of Books.

Elizabeth Hand’s (Popular Fiction, Fiction) forthcoming collection, The Best of Elizabeth Hand, received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which called it “a superior collection [of] prose that elevates genre tropes to transcendent levels.  Readers will be blown away.” Her novel The Book of Lamps and Banners made BookPage’s Top 10 list for the year’s best crime & suspense fiction, and received more rave reviews from Crime Reads, Crime Fiction Lover, and The Portland Press Herald. She was recently profiled at LitHub, and her review of Lisa Robinson’s rock and roll memoir, Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls, just ran in The Washington Post.

This month Cara Hoffman (Fiction, Popular Fiction) signed a two-book contract with PM Press for a collection of essays and a collection of short stories; she will also be featured in their Outspoken Author series. Her most recent children’s novel, The Ballad of Tubs Marshfield (Harper Collins), was named an Indie Next pick; she was recently interviewed in Grist about the book. Her essay “The Evolution of Everyday Life” about the scientist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin will appear in LitHub in mid-December.

ALUMS

Jillian Abbott (Popular Fiction, S’04) been invited to present a paper on the Curating the Self panel and moderate another panel at the Teaching Life Writing Conference, an international virtual conference on nonfiction and pedagogy at the University of Alberta, Canada, December 10-11, 2020. She’ll moderate the panel RT1 Life Writing Beyond the Undergraduate Literary Classroom at 8:00 a.m. MST on December 10, 2020.

Laurie Lico Albanese (Creative Nonfiction, S’16) has sold her novel Hester to Sarah Cantin at St. Martin’s in a two-book pre-empt deal. Hester, set in Salem 1829, is the retelling of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter told from the “real” Hester’s POV. Laurie started the novel while she was a student at Stonecoast working with mentor Susan Conley. 

Carina Bissett (Popular Fiction, S’18) published a ghost story written in her last workshop with Liz Hand. That story, “Gaze with Undimmed Eyes and the World Drops Dead,” was published in the anthology Terror at ‘5280, which recently won Best Anthology at the 2020 Best Book Awards (BBA) by American Book Fest. She also made an appearance at MileHiCon 52 as a speaker on the panels “Building SF & Fantasy Mythologies” and “Modern Age of Poetry.”

Wingless Dreamer, a publisher of books of poetry, published “Sticks” by J Brooke (Poetry, S’19) in their recent volume entitled Sunkissed. While J has had a string of published essays since graduating, “Sticks” marks the first poem that has been published.

Renee S. DeCamillis’s (Popular Fiction, W’14) short story “Bad Trip Highway” appears in the new horror anthology Wicked Women, which was published by NEHW Press in November and features all women authors and artists from New England. 

Jess Flarity (Popular Fiction, S’18) interviewed former Stonecoast faculty member James Patrick Kelly for Barnstorm, the University of New Hampshire’s official literary journal. You can read Jim’s thoughts on writing during the pandemic, how stories turn into movies, contemporary Chinese science fiction and other topics under this fall semester’s segment of “The Writer’s Hot Seat,” available online.

Gail Hovey (Creative Nonfiction, S’11) is pleased to announce that she was interviewed on Books Q&As with Deborah Kalb on October 31.

Clifford Royal Johns (Popular Fiction, W’18) has committed cozy with his mystery short story, “Death in the Lower Forty,” which is in the newly released anthology, Cozy Villages of Death.

Alan King (Poetry, W’13) has a new video inspired by his poem “Gluttony.” The poem is from his forthcoming chapbook from Plan B Press.

40 Thieves on Saipan, written by Joseph Tachovsky and Cynthia Kraack (Fiction, W’10), was awarded Winner in the Military History category of the American Book Fest competition.

Andrea Lani (Fiction, W’12) is delighted to share that she has signed with Bison Books, the trade imprint of the University of Nebraska Press, for publication of her memoir Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail.

Nina Lichtenstein (Creative Nonfiction, S’20) recently had a flash essay published in Moment Magazine. She’s also pleased to finally see published the result of ten years’ work, The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, Volume 9: Catastrophe and Rebirth, where she was on the advisory board and did much of the research that resulted in the inclusion of literature and culture by Jews from Arab lands, often excluded from Anglophone, Ashkenaz-centric publications. (The dude standing on his head looks like Picasso, but it’s Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel).

Julia McKenzie Munemo (Creative Nonfiction, S’16) spoke to Dani Shapiro for the Family Secrets podcast about the secret at the center of her memoir The Book Keeper: A Memoir of Race, Love, and Legacy.

J. Stephen (Steve) Rhodes’s (Poetry, W ’11) latest poetry collection, was that you Boss?,has been accepted for publication by Wipf and Stock Publishers in 2021. The collection consists of psalm poems addressed to an unspecified higher power, and they rely heavily on an intimate language drawn from experiences of nature and life on a farm. The collection is dedicated, in part, to Maurice Manning, whose collection Bucolics had no little influence on the author.

Linda K. Sienkiewicz (Fiction, S’09) announces her first picture book, Gordy and the Ghost Crab, published by Writer’s Coffee Bar Press. Linda wrote and illustrated the text herself and created her own book trailer. The PreK-age 8 book also includes fun facts about crabs and a conservation message. Teacher’s guide available. The book is available on Amazon, Barnes and Nobles and bookstores nationwide.