ANNOUNCEMENTS
A CELEBRATION OF NATIVE WRITERS
October 4, 2022, 7:00 p.m.-8:15 p.m.
Join the Maine literary community for a night of conversation and readings by three critically acclaimed Native writers working in different genres and coming from different nations. Stonecoast Fiction faculty and Winter ’19 alum Morgan Talty (Night of the Living Rez), Terese Marie Mailhot (Heart Berries), and Joan Naviyuk Kane (Dark Traffic) will share their work and discuss how their experiences have shaped and inspired their stories, essays, and poems. Free and open to the public, this event is co-sponsored and co-hosted by USM’s Gloria S. Duclos Convocation and is part of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s 2022 Maine Lit Fest.
Donna Loring, elder and former council member of the Penobscot Indian Nation, will introduce the event, and Libby Bischof, co-chair of USM’s Convocation Committee, will moderate the conversation.
Event information | Watch the livestream
JOIN MWPA’S MAINE LIT FEST!
September 30 – October 8, 2022
Stonecoast is proud to be a community partner of MWPA’s 2022 Maine Lit Fest. After extended time apart, the Maine Lit Fest addresses the need for a welcoming large-scale series of gatherings that celebrate diverse experiences and stories and bring Maine’s communities together through the power of the written and spoken word.
The Maine Lit Fest includes a week of readings, conversations, and happenings, beginning in Waterville and then heading down to Portland, including a final day full of free outdoor events in Downtown Portland, and a bookfair featuring Maine publishers and author collectives.
ALUMS
Laurie Lico Albanese (Creative Nonfiction, S’16) will be presenting her new novel Hester (St. Martin’s Press, 10/4/22), inspired by The Scarlet Letter, at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem on October 7th and at the Texas Book Festival in Austin November 5-6.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey‘s (Creative Nonfiction, S’15) natural history memoir, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, has been selected by NYU-Shanghai Reads. The book will be integrated into the NYU-Shanghai curriculum throughout the 2022-2023 academic year. Events utilizing the book each semester will include literature lectures, nature, environmental, and health activities, and art and original music compositions.
Shannon Bowring (Fiction, W’22) is beyond thrilled to announce the sale of her debut novel, The Road to Dalton, to Europa Editions, projected publication date June 2023. The book, which began its life as a linked collection of stories about a small town in Northern Maine, also served as Shannon’s Stonecoast thesis.
Kathy Briccetti (Creative Nonfiction, W’07) published a piece of short fiction titled “Radiant Crown” in Short Édition, which can be viewed both online and via story dispensers located in transit stations in the San Francisco Bay Area and worldwide.
J Brooke (Poetry, S’19) has an essay entitled “Tanker” in the newest issue of The Massachusetts Review (Vol. 63, No. 3). J worked with Mass Review Prose Editor Morgan Talty (a friend and former Stonecoast Review colleague) on the final edit before publication—“Working with Morgan again was 100% the happy place.” Copies can be ordered here.
Lauren M. Davis (Poetry, S’15) has published a poetry collection with Finishing Line Press. Women Bones is available on the FLP website.
The cover was revealed for J.R. Dawson’s debut novel, The First Bright Thing, a story about a magical circus trying to change the world one good deed at a time. It will be released by Tor on June 13, 2023. Artwork by Katie Klimowicz. Preorders here.
Jen Dupree (Fiction, W’15) will be a guest on the Cold River Radio Show on Sunday, October 16th. Tickets for the in-person or live-stream event, as well as more info, can be found here.
Elizabeth W. Garber (CNF W’10) is continuing to give talks and appear at book festivals with her new book, Sailing at the Edge of Disaster: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Daring Year. A Camden, Maine, filmmaker created a short book trailer to transport the viewer to a hippie school at sea in the 70s. On Saturday, October 8th, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., Elizabeth will have her books available at the Maine Lit Bookfair at Monument Square, 456 Congress Street, Portland, Maine. Elizabeth will share her time between these book tables: Toad Hall Editions, She Writes Press, and Locally Grown Books from Belfast Maine. On Thursday, October 27th, at 7:00 p.m., she will give an in-person talk and reading at the Lincolnville Community Library about her new book. On Saturday, October 29th, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., find Elizabeth and her memoir at the Boston Book Festival at Copley Square Park in the booth with The Title Doctor, Kristen Paulson-Nguyen, who worked with her creatively to get the title right!
Veda Boyd Jones (Fiction, S’17) sold a short story to Woman’s World, dated October 24th, but hits check-out lines October 13th. She sold three pieces to the 2023 Harris’ Farmer’s Almanac, currently on newsstands. Also, her Christmas romance novella, The So-Called Never-Fail No-Risk Plan, launched October 1st on Kindle.
Natalie Harris-Spencer (Fiction, S’21) is delighted to share that she has been chosen as the winner of the 2022 Chestnut Review Stubborn Writers Contest. Her winning story, “Fish Mother,” will appear in the January issue. More details to follow.
Alan King (Poetry, W’13) is thrilled to announce that there’s a teaching guide for his short film “Sing the Heart of the Magic” that highlights the life of Jennifer L. Nelson, whose sister Marilyn Nelson was a 2009 Stonecoast MFA visiting faculty. Jennifer is a trailblazer who contributed richly to the DC arts community. If you are homeschooling or are a teacher, the teaching guide helps you use the film to teach lessons about social impact, theatre of the oppressed, and hip-hop theatre. Check out the guide here.
Nina B. Lichtenstein (Creative Nonfiction, S’20) had an essay published in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, an online litmag with the tagline, “Brazen words by witty dames.Everything true. More or less.”You can read her essay “Falling” here. This is the fourth time she has had a piece in this feisty pub, and she is humbled (and tickled!) to be in company of some of her literary idols, like Vivian Gornick and Abigail Thomas.
On October 26th, Tom MacDonald (Fiction, W’09) will be publishing his fifth novel in the Dermot Sparhawk crime series, titled The Murder of Vincent Dunn.
Nadja Maril’s (Fiction, W’20) short story “It Began with Something That Might Break” will be published in the fall issue of Rock Salt Journal, a New England Literary Magazine.
Ellen Meeropol (Fiction, W’06) is promoting her new novel The Lost Women of Azalea Court (published September 13th) at several upcoming readings: October 3rd in person at the Wellfleet Public Library, October 12th in person at the Lenox Library, October 13th in person at Belmont Books, and October 27th virtually at an event hosted by PRINT Bookshop in Portland (in conversation with Stonecoast alum Colin W. Sargent, Fiction, S’04). Details and additional events available here.
Marisca Pichette (Popular Fiction, S’21)is thrilled to share the cover of her debut poetry collection! Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair includes fifty new and collected poems centered on mythology, natural magic, and queer folklore. Preorders are live in the Android Press bookstore. In addition, she has new work out in Flash Fiction Online, Savant-Garde, and more.
The flash form strikes again: two more of sid sibo’s small fictions will be published, this time at Bull Men’s Fiction. The first, “Flip,” owes its existence to an old nemesis, who here creates his own demise. Winter ’19 fiction alum sidney woods hasn’t seen that guy in a good long while. The second, “Howl,” began from a prompt in a Stonecoast workshop.
Kevin St. Jarre (Popular Fiction, S’10) has accepted a position teaching at the University of Southern Maine in the English Department.
Just in time for Labor Day, Jacob Strunk (Fiction, W’06) celebrated capitalism with a new story in The Chamber Magazine. Read it on the clock. Take a long lunch.
Becky Thompson’s (Poetry, W’21) new book of poetry To Speak in Salt, which is dedicated to Stonecoast’s Katherine Larson, has been submitted for consideration for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry by the publisher, Ex Ophidia Press. Becky is over the moon with appreciation to all who made the book possible. All respect to people forced to leave their homelands.
Robin Clifford Wood (Creative Nonfiction, S’15) will be sharing a table and signing books with four other Maine authors at the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance book fair on October 8th, part of a weeklong MWPA lit fest at Monument Square, Portland, Maine, 10:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m. She also had an article in the August issue of Decor Maine Magazine, “Island Time.” Finally, she will be presenting a book talk about her award-winning biography/memoir, The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine, at the Bremen Maine Library at 5:00 p.m. on October 20th.
FACULTY
Faith Adiele signed a contract with Detour: Best Stories in Black Travel to become their first columnist. After writing about hating nature in Alaska, visiting Baldwin’s village in France, a retiree who leads tours recreating Harriet Tubman’s journeys, and an artist taking on Louis Agassiz’s racist legacy for the new travel brand, Faith was offered a weekly spot. The column will appear in The Miami Herald, The Charlotte Observer, and on the Detour website and social media. Her first two articles, “The Importance of Being Ernest” and “A Snapshot of visual storyteller Lọlá Ákínmádé Åkerström” are already published, with more to follow each week, so keep an eye out!
John Florio (Creative Nonfiction, Popular Fiction Faculty | Fiction/Popular Fiction, S’07) has two historical crime novels, Sugar Pop Moon and Blind Moon Alley, being re-released as crime classics by Open Road Media in December. His next YA nonfiction book, Doomed: Sacco, Vanzetti, and the End of the American Dream is coming from Macmillan in January; his follow-up YA book, Marked Man: Frank Serpico and the Price of Being and Honest Cop, is scheduled for fall 2023.
I’ll Show You Mine, the feature film that Elizabeth Searle (Fiction, Popular Fiction, Scriptwriting) co-wrote, is screening at the New Festival in New York City on Saturday evening, October 22nd. Streaming tickets are available (see link below). New Fest writes, “This intimate drama from director Megan Griffiths and Duplass Brother Productions weaves an engrossing, confrontational story of familial power structures and secret sexual proclivities. With dynamic performances from Poorna Jagannathan and Casey Thomas Brown, I’ll Show You Mine is a wildly engrossing and surprising two-hander.” The film is also screening and streaming at Port Townsend Film Festival (PTFilmfest.com) September 26th through October 2nd. Info and tickets for the New York New Festival screening/streaming in October can be found here.
Elizabeth and Suzanne Strempek Shea are co-teaching a Virtual workshop, Flashing Through the Genres, on November 5th as part of IOTA, the Short Form Conference/Workshops co-run by Suzanne and star Stonecoast alum Penny Guisinger (Creative Nonfiction, S’13). Try out different genres in Flash Form in Suzanne’s and Elizabeth’s online workshop and leave this intensive generative workshop with multiple drafts for new work. IOTA Info/SignUp.
Morgan Talty’s (Fiction Faculty | Fiction, W’19) Night of the Living Rez has won The New England Book Award in Fiction, and his collection was recently shortlisted for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Prize.
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