ANNOUNCEMENTS

STONECOAST SUMMER 2024 RESIDENCY PRESENTATION SUBMISSIONS
We are thrilled to announce that Stonecoast is now accepting presentation submissions for the Summer 2024 residency. If you are interested in teaching a 60-minute presentation from 8:15 am to 9:15 am, please provide a detailed description of your class or panel to Robin Talbot (robin.talbot@maine.edu) no later than Monday, February 26, 2024. Your presentation or panel description should be between 150-175 words and include a “Suggested Reading” section. Alums who are not local will teach via Zoom. Alums will be paid a modest stipend.

Below is a list of presentations, panels, and topics proposed in the past. The list below is only a suggested list. We welcome any topics that alums are passionate about teaching and sharing with MFA students. 

• Craft, Editing
• Scriptwriting
• World Poetry 
• Author Profiles
• Pedagogy 
• Interviewing and Profiling
• Writing monologues/performative writing
• Lyric Essay
• Sensory details
• Publishing 
• Worldbuilding 
• Antiracism Workshops 
• Eco-poetics at the core social justice   
• Hybrid forms/deconstructs genre/write out of your genre
•  Line-editing and copy-editing/crash course
• Reading the Other/Writing the Other
• Historical fiction/CNF/Pop/Poetry
• Revision
• Social Justice 
• Collaborations
• Space opera
• Writing about trauma. How do you interview someone who has experienced trauma (e.g. first responders, people on the front lines of civil rights, gay rights movements.)

We look forward to hearing from you soon!

STONECOAST READING AT KGB BAR
Stonecoast alumni and faculty will read at KGB bar in New York City on Wednesday, January 17^th, at 7:00 p.m. Make a trip to New York or stop by if you’re in the area to hear Breena Clarke (Fiction Faculty), Clif Travers (Fiction, S’17), Dana Robbins (Poetry, W’13), Laurie Lico Albanese (Creative Nonfiction, S’16), and Jennifer Dupree (Fiction, W’15) read from their recent books. Books and booze (or non-boozy drinks)—what could be better? 

MAINE CHARACTER ENERGY
Maine Character Energy (Rogue Owl Press) will be published on January 17, 2024, but pre-order is now available! The anthology, edited by Sarah (Flynn) Parke (Popular Fiction, W’15), features 11 written works about the Pine Tree State and its many original characters from several Stonecoast alumni. All proceeds (100%) from the sale of the anthology will be donated to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit organization which advocates for gun control legislation and education, in honor of the victims, survivors, and the families impacted by the Lewiston-Auburn mass shooting that rocked the Maine community on October 25, 2023. Visit Rogue Owl Press to pre-order your copy today! *Note: Orders placed through the Rogue Owl Press site or Bookshop.org will result in a larger contribution to the nonprofit organization.

ALUMS 

Jillian Abbott’s (Popular Fiction, S’04) op-ed “York College CUNY Is Killing the American Dream” was published in New York Daily News in December.

Lester Batiste (Poetry, S’16) wanted to share the fabulous news that his debut poetry collection, Angel and Night’s Youngest, will come out in 2024 from Black Spring Press Group in the UK. Check out the pre-order link. 

Elizabeth Beechwood (Popular Fiction, S’14) is pleased to announce the release of her short story and poetry collection, Strange Memories: Short Fiction and Poems for Flying and Forgetting. Cover art, back copy, and editing by Sarah Parke (Popular Fiction, W’15). (She also created this image!)

Peter Adrian Behravesh (Popular Fiction, W’18) narrated Damini Kane’s story “Creatures in the Walls” for the December 12 episode of PodCastle. In addition, he was interviewed for the December 5 episode as part of PodCastle‘s 15th anniversary celebrations.

Libby Cudmore (Popular Fiction/Creative Nonfiction, S’10) was awarded the Black Orchid Novella Award by the Wolfe Pack: The Nero Wolfe Society. Her novella “Alibi in Ice” is another entry in her Shamus award-winning Wade & Jacks series and will mark her debut in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine in July 2024.

Julie C. Day (Popular Fiction, S’12) is excited to announce a virtual roundtable Storyteller: The Legacy and Work of Tanith Lee will be held on January 21st. The event is both a celebration of Tanith Lee’s work and an exploration of her influence on some of today’s most beloved authors. It’s also a lead up to the Kickstarter for the upcoming Storyteller: A Tanith Lee Tribute Anthology (Essential Dreams Press) and is cosponsored by Essential Dreams Press and The Outer Dark Collective. Panelists include Melanie R. Anderson, Craig Laurance Gidney, Lisa Kröger, and Terri Windling with moderator Julie. Though the event is free, preregistration is required. All who RSVP will have their name entered into the event’s two drawings! (Note: You must be present to win.)  

Aimee Degroat‘s (Fiction, S’21, publishing under AJ Newsom) short story “Simple Man” was published in the Zoetic Press Anthology Heathentide Orphans, available on Amazon.

David Hewitt‘s (Popular Fiction, S’09) story “The Adventures of Zeedae and Them Gol-durned Genset-D Boys” will appear in the Winter 2024 edition of Dragon Gems, slated for release in late January 2024.

Nadja Maril (Fiction, W’20) begins the new year with two additional publication announcements: her CNF piece “Lipstick” will be published this month in Hare’s Paw Literary Journal and her flash fiction “Three Secrets” will appear in the spring issue of The Nassau Review.

Inspired by her 14 years as a naturalist and adventure guide and a decade as a creative writer, Jenny O’Connell (Creative Nonfiction, S’17)recently launched her newest heart project: Wild Story, a Substack of essays written from the place where an outdoor life meets the creative journey. Jenny is thrilled to have joined the faculty at Hugo House and Maine Media Workshops, and she’s teaching two online classes this spring—a personal essay course (MMW) and a Nonfiction Character Intensive (Hugo House). She’s looking forward to joining the Stonecoast residency as an alumni presenter this January. 

Suri Parmar (Popular Fiction, W17) is happy to announce that her short story “Hound of Hell” was recently published in Issue 20 of Headland, a journal based in New Zealand. You can read it here.

Jonathan Pessant (Poetry, W’21) has two poems in the Tokyo Poetry Journal. “Vaporware” and “20 Minutes from Asakusa to Daimon Station” appear in Issue 14: EROS.

Marisca Pichette (Popular Fiction, S’21) will be a panelist and reader at Arisia 2024 from January 13-15 in Boston! She hopes to see some fellow Stonecoasters there.

Bruce Pratt‘s (Fiction, S’04) short story “A Star Near Orion” will appear in the Maine-themed charity anthology Maine Character Energy, due for publication from Rogue Owl Press mid-January. For information on how to order this anthology and to learn about how it will benefit those most affected by the Lewiston mass shootings, please click here.

Sean Robinson (Popular Fiction, W’14) is pleased to share that his novelette “Three Nights in Orissa” has been released by Prismastica Press. It’s set in the world of his thesis and features both unicorns and princes in disguise. He would love for you to check it out, and maybe add it to your end-of-year lists! Sean is also pleased to share that he recently defended his doctoral dissertation in education from Plymouth State University looking at rural education and community development. If anyone has educational needs, feel free to reach out at robinsonedpartners.com

Slippery new fiction from Jacob Strunk (Fiction, W’07) has landed at A Thin Slice of Anxiety, one of the more bizarre stories he’s written. What can we say? It’s getting weird out there, people. 

Gina Troisi‘s (Creative Nonfiction, W’09) linked short-story collection, After the Rush, recently won the 2023 Book Pipeline Unpublished Contest for Literary Fiction. 

The upcoming charity anthology Maine Character Energy has accepted the flash fiction “Glass Eels” by sid sibo (sidney woods, Fiction, W’19) for this project supporting survivors of last October’s shootings in Lewiston, ME.

FACULTY  

Faith Adiele’s newest books, Her Voice and Voice/Over, are now listed for pre-order at tamupress.com, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and many other online vendors.

Rick Bass (Creative Nonfiction and Fiction) reports that the recent Biden announcement to conserve and protect all remaining old growth on public lands has at its heart the long passionate work from the Stonecoast community, focusing on the Black Ram region of Northwest Montana, the Yaak Valley specifically, but expanding to all old and mature forests, valued for their ability to preserve biodiversity and store in long-term safekeeping vast amounts of carbon. A climate mitigation solution, the largest and easiest, is occurring right in front of our eyes, with its genesis, its seed, in the heart of the Stonecoast community’s advocacy for Black Ram—soon to be the site of the nation’s first Climate Refuge. Congratulations to all of you who contacted Representative Chellie Pingree, who was a major influencer in the Biden administration’s decision. Unfortunately, the Forests Service is still overseeing this protection, and they have shown in scattered enclaves throughout the national forest system that they cannot always be trusted to serve any other need than timber. We will need to remain vigilant and engaged. But the path we dreamed for a Climate Refuge is opened, the first in a Curtain of Green stretching across the northern tier of the United States, and then the northern tier of the world. It began with one seed, one idea, one community: Stonecoast.

Aaron Hamburger (Creative Nonfiction, Fiction) is teaching a class on Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton novels online via Politics and Prose, starting January 23. Coming up in February, Aaron will be teaching a personal narrative class online via Maine Media Workshops. And on Sunday, February 4, Aaron will be in conversation with Lauren Grodstein, author of We Must Not Think of Ourselves, at Park Books in Annapolis at 3:00 p.m. Additionally, Aaron was interviewed about Hotel Cuba by novelist Virginia Hartman for the Washington Independent Review of Books, which you can read here, and Stonecoast alum J Brooke interviewed Aaron about Hotel Cuba for Streetlight, which you can read here. And also: NPR’s All Things Considered featured Hotel Cuba as one of their memorable stories from 2023.

Elizabeth Hand’s (Popular Fiction, Fiction) novel A Haunting on the Hill was named one of 2023’s Best Books by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and Paste Magazine, among others, and the audiobook was named one of the year’s ten best by Slate. She recently signed a two-book contract with Mulholland Books for novels Unspeakable Things, loosely inspired by Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Maluaka Gulch, a sequel to Hokuloa Road.

In the fall of 2023, Debra Marquart (Creative Nonfiction, Poetry) was invited to give readings and performances at several libraries in Iowa (Waterloo, Carroll, Council Bluffs, Corallville, and Dyersville), as well as Waldorf College, the Twin Cities Book Festival, the South Dakota Book Festival, the Iowa City “Poetry in Motion, Mic Check,” and at Poetry on the Prairie. A five-part long poem sequence from Debra’s in-progress book, “Leave it in the Ground,” received short-list honors for the Manchester Poetry Prize in the UK. Each of the shortlisted authors and poets performed readings of their work during the gala-prize giving ceremony which took place at Manchester Met’s Grosvenor East building, home to Manchester Writing School and Manchester Poetry Library.

Elizabeth Searle (Fiction, Popular Fiction, Scriptwriting) will be featured on an ‘Ask Me Anything’ virtual event from Women in Film & Video New England, taking place live on January 24th at 7:00 p.m. She will discuss and do Q/A on reaching the screen as a co-writer on her first Feature Film, I’ll Show You Mine, as well as her tips for adapting fiction to film. All are welcome! RSVP here. Also, Elizabeth was invited to write a Guest Post on the Stage 32 blog, discussing how to enter the film world as a fiction writer and how she got signed on by manager and producer Tammy Hunt of Sandstone Artists. Elizabeth’s newest short story, “The Ones Who Are Gone,” is published in Solstice (Winter print issue). She is proud to appear in this issue alongside fellow Stonecoast faculty JJ Amaworo Wilson.