ANNOUNCEMENTS

2022 STONECOAST ALUMNI READING SERIES, PART II

Stonecoast is proud of our alumni authors! Please join us on Monday, December 5th, at 7:30 p.m. EST for Part II of the 2022 Alumni Reading Series, featuring:

• Lisa C. Taylor (Poetry, S’04)
• Becky Thompson (Poetry, W’21)
• Jeanette Lynes (Poetry & Fiction, S’05)
• Ellen Meeropol (Fiction, W’06)

RSVP HERE

2023 AWP MINI-REUNION

Our fearless leader, Robin Talbot, and Stonecoast alums Amy Martin (Creative Nonfiction, W’12) and Melody Fuller (Creative Nonfiction, S’12) are exploring the possibility of having a mini-reunion-get-together at the 2023 AWP Conference and Bookfair in Seattle, Washington (March 8-11). Interested alums, faculty, staff, and current students, please contact Amy Martin by November 15, 2022, at punchyoguts@gmail.com, so we will know how or if to move forward!

EXPLORATIONS IN CREATIVE NONFICTION

Robin Clifford Wood (Creative Nonfiction, S’15), winner of both the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction and the John N. Cole Award, will lead a five-week Explorations in Creative Nonfiction this winter, January 19 to February16. The course will look at personal essays, blogs, research, other people’s stories, interviews, and memoir. If you or someone you know might be interested, read more here.

ALUMS 

Shannon Bowring (Fiction, W’22) encourages Stonecoasters (and beyond) to preorder her debut novel, The Road to Dalton, release date June 6, 2023. She encourages you even more to support indie publishers and booksellers by preordering from Europa Editions or Bookshop.org, rather than Amazon. Shannon is also thrilled to share two bits of flash fiction news: Her piece “Dirty Shirley” recently appeared online at Fractured Literary as one of their Anthology II Contest Winners, and will be available in print, release date TBD. Her piece “Yellow Bird” was selected as the flash fiction winner for the 2022 Julia Peterkin Literary Award for Flash Fiction and Poetry and will be published by South 85 Journal in December.

Kathy Briccetti‘s (Creative Nonfiction, W’08) novel manuscript is a semi-finalist in the Galloway Books First Novel Contest and a finalist in the 2022 San Francisco Writers’ Conference Fiction Contest. Whether They Be is set in the turbulent days of 1968 when a shameful secret is exposed, forcing two families, one white and one black, to confront their history and negotiate their paths forward. Hopefully this will help the manuscript find the right home!

Minerva Canto (Fiction, S’18) has joined the editorial board of The Los Angeles Times where she writes editorials and occasional essays. She recently wrote about how reading banned books with her kids sparked their joy for reading and about her experiences with affirmative action. She also moderated a panel, “Writing About Culture: Appropriate or Appropriation?” during the November ArtsWalk in Riverside, California, for the literary nonprofit Inlandia Institute, where she serves as treasurer and directs the DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility) Committee.

Aimee Degroat (Fiction, S’21; writing as Aimee Newsom) will have her story “Front Seat Country” published in the Spring 23 print edition of West Trade Review. Her story “Gone Wild” was a finalist for the Whitefish Review Montana Prize for Fiction.

Lo Galluccio (Poetry, S’19) will perform songs from her collection of CDs and poems from Not for Amnesia (Cervena Barva Press, January 2023) in Somerville, MA (see poster/invite below).

David A. Hewitt‘s (Popular Fiction, S’09) haibun (haiku diary) “Study Abroad” appears in the 6th issue of White Enso Art & Literary Journal, available online December 1st.

Lexa Hillyer (Poetry, S’10) launched her new site for creativity coaching. Now a certified Master Coach with a speciality in Jungian psychology, she works with writers and other creatives to get better results in their careers and in life by discovering their internal roadblocks, cultivating inspiration, and getting in touch with their inner wisdom.

Veda Boyd Jones (Fiction, S’17) sold a short mystery story, “The Mistletoe Caper,” to Woman’s World. The issue is dated December 26th, but hits check-out lines December 15th. 

Lissa Kiernan‘s (Poetry, S’11) second full-length poetry collection, The Whispering Wall, is now available for pre-order at http://www.whisperingwall.org.

John Christopher Nelson (Fiction, S’15) has two recent publications. The first is a flash fiction piece about interviewing a retired President Eisenhower that Mary Rose Primosch included in her book, Ourselves, Collected, a project that transformed a series of flash writing into graphic design pieces. The first pressing has sold through; however, John has a PDF of his contribution. If you’d like to check out “Before an Interview,” you’re welcome to email him directly and he’ll send it your way. The second publication, “Epithalamium as Eulogy,” is a flash CNF work about getting divorced, included in DUM DUM Zine, Issue No. 7: QUAR + TIME.

Marisca Pichette (Popular Fiction, S’21)celebrated two milestone publications in November! Her story “She Dreams of Moons and Moons,” which she read for her graduation from Stonecoast, was published with original art in Strange Horizons. At the end of the month, she and Dyani Sabin (Popular Fiction, S’21) both had stories published in Volume 5, Issue 2 of Vastarien: A Literary Journal. Finally, three of her 2022 poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize! All three nominated poems will be in her debut poetry collection, Rivers in Your Skin, Sirens in Your Hair, which is up for pre-order in the Android Press bookstore. 

Tamie Parker Song (Creative Nonfiction, S’12) published her essay “Disobedience” in the Spring 2022 issue of Selkie Zine. She’s just now getting around to letting everyone know! It can be found here. 

Kevin St. Jarre‘s (Popular Fiction, S’10) two novels—Celestine and Aliens, Drywall, and a Unicycle—both published by Encircle Publications, are being produced as soon-to-be released audiobooks.

Skiving Down the Bones, a new collection of poems about illness, loss, and grief by Olive L. Sullivan (Fiction/Poetry, S’15) is now available from Meadowlark Books. Olive’s poem “Gas Station Guru” is also slated to appear on the Silver Birch Press poetry blog in December. 

Every year, two hundred million people make pilgrimages to religious and spiritual sites around the world. The Geriatric Pilgrim: Tales from the Journey (Maine Authors Publishing) is a series of 50 reflections of how Rick Wile’s (Creative Nonfiction, W’05) pilgrimage experiences have taught him that life itself can be a pilgrimage: both an exterior and interior journey, one involving curiosity, vulnerability, discomfort, an embracing of the unknown, and a recognition that there is, as 12-steppers say, a higher power and that we’re not it. Whether he’s writing about struggling with the sun and souvenir sellers in the Old City of Jerusalem, watching a lion in the Serengeti in Africa, hiking barefoot to the Holiday Island of Lindisfarne in England, searching for family roots in Nova Scotia, or navigating memories of growing up in a small Maine town the 1950’s, Rick is also exploring his interior journeys to find healing from growing up in an alcoholic family, the death of his eighteen-year-old daughter, and growing old during a worldwide pandemic. Part travelogue, part rumination on grief and grace, part coming of (old) age memoir, The Geriatric Pilgrim reveals how viewing life as a pilgrimage can bring healing and hope. Also, see Rick’s monthly blog.

Two sid sibo stories will appear in the Fall 2022 issue of Cardinal Sins. “Dust” is a story touching on the plight of Chinese sex slaves in Western goldrush days. Fiction alum sidney woods (W’19) styled the death-with-dignity story “Horizontal” after an early Barry Lopez piece.

FACULTY  

Faith Adiele (Creative Nonfiction) continues her weekly DETOUR travel column “Small World, Big Love” with “Black Food Summit Draws Chefs, Farmers, Creatives and Foodies to the Bay Area”; all of her prior pieces can be accessed here. She also contributed to the recently published Write Now! SF Bay anthology, Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism (Pease Press, San Francisco, 2022) and her recent hybrid chapbook submission received an offer for publication in 2023 by Small Harbor Publishing.

Aaron Hamburger‘s (Fiction, Creative Nonfiction) new novel Hotel Cuba, due out May 2 from Harper Perennial, now has a beautiful cover. See below for a sneak peek at it. If you’d like to pre-order the book, our own Barbara Kelly at Kelly’s Books to Go can set you up. (It’s also available at all the other places too, but of course, we love supporting Kelly!)

Elizabeth Hand’s (Popular Fiction, Fiction) novel Hokuloa Road was named a New York Times Notable Book for 2022, along with Morgan Talty’s (Fiction Faculty | Fiction, W’19) Night of the Living Rez. In March 2023, she and MaryAnne Mohanraj will be the instructors at the inaugural Salam Award Writers Workshop in Lahore, Pakistan. Liz’s recent reviews include Katherine Dunn’s posthumous novel, Toad, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Númenor, both for The Washington Post. She recently appeared in a two-part Legsville interview with Legs McNeil, discussing the Cass Neary series and Liz’s forthcoming novel A Haunting on the Hill. On December 14, Shirley Jackson’s birthday, Liz will be part of an online symposium on Jackson’s work held at Trinity College, Dublin, along with several of Jackson’s children and grandchildren, among others.

Robert Levy‘s (Popular Fiction) story collection No One Dies from Love: Dark Tales of Loss and Longing will be published next year by Word Horde.

Elizabeth Searle (Fiction, Popular Fiction, Scriptwriting) has an essay, “Moving Map,” in a new anthology from New Rivers Press: UNBOUND: Composing Home. The book features Covid-era essays on the concept of ‘home.’ The book was featured at the Arlington Author Salon Book Fair, where Elizabeth appeared in November. Check out the book as a Recommended Title at Small Press Distribution.