ALUMS 

Sarah Baldwin (Creative Nonfiction, S’15) had an article about a scholar’s research on young Jewish refugees in the U.S. during WWII published by Colgate Research. Her flash essay titled “Twelve Weeks” appeared in the inaugural issue of In Short.

Shannon Bowring (Fiction, W’22) has been remiss in reporting several good pieces of book-related news: Her debut novel, The Road to Dalton, won this year’s Maine Literary Award for Fiction. The sequel to Dalton, Where the Forest Meets the River, will be published on September 3rd by Europa Editions and has already received favorable reviews from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. Shannon will be promoting Forest throughout September and October, including an event with Stonecoast’s own Susan Conley! Click here for a full list of Shannon’s bookish events (updated on a fairly regular basis). To preorder Where the Forest Meets the River, click here, or contact Barbara Kelly of Kelly’s Books to Go. 

J Brooke (Poetry, S’19) recently became the Prose Book Reviews Editor at The Rumpus. If you’re an author and you have an upcoming prose (sorry poets!) book, hit them up. If you’re a writer with a review of a book you’re passionate about OR want to discuss writing a book review in the future, hit them up. J has a long, damning article in the newest issue of East Magazine (one of the surviving big beautiful glossies) but it can also be read online here. 

On August 8th, at 6:00 pm, in Bangor, Maine, come join Penny Guisinger (Creative Nonfiction, S’13) and Robin Clifford Wood (Creative Nonfiction, S’15) as they launch some lively conversation about Penny’s fabulous new memoir, Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions. Hosted by Briar Patch Books in their new “Bookspace” at 48 Columbia Street.

Natalie Harris-Spencer (Fiction, S’21) was a Top Pick in the 2024 Killer Nashville Claymore Awards for best first 50 pages of an unpublished manuscript (suspense category).

David A. Hewitt’s (Popular Fiction, S’09) story “The Breadships,” selected for a Readers’ Choice Award after its appearance last year in Amazing Stories, has been published in their Best of 2023 anthology, available in both print and digital formats. 

Veda Boyd Jones (Fiction, S’17) explores the kindness and vindictiveness of small-town life in 1954 in her mainstream historical novel Corner of Pearl & Moffet, now available on Kindle. Thanks to Stonecoast faculty mentors Boman Desai, Suzanne Strempek Shea, and Dolen Perkins-Valdez for their insights into this story all those years ago.  

Linda Quinby Lambert (Creative Nonfiction, W’16), along with two other community members, received the Village Books Literary Citizenship award (see page 5) and a $1000 each.

Nina B. Lichtenstein (Creative Nonfiction, S’20) would like you all to know that Maine Writers Studio’s First Annual Fall Writing Retreat, taking place October 18-20th on Bailey Island, ME, is open for registration. The retreat will be intimate with max 13 participants (and discounted if sharing a room), in glorious natural surroundings on the Maine coast. Find out more and register here. Nina also had a craft piece out “On Getting My Writing Mojo Back, Post October 7th” on the Fig Tree Books Blog. Finally, you are all welcome to join Maine Writer’s Studio Open Mic on August 14th, taking place in Brunswick, ME, in Nina’s garden. RSVP on link for the address.

Catharine H. Murray (Creative Nonfiction, S’17) has been invited by Memoirs on the Marsh in Scarborough, Maine, to teach an in-person Writing Weekend for Women August 23-25. A group of 12 women will gather for a weekend of rest, writing, connection and inspiration on the coast of Maine. In August, registration opens for Catharine’s genre-bending poetry/prose workshop Little Frankensteins. In this five-week online zoom workshop, each week a new form provides constraints that become a combustion chamber of creativity. 

Suri Parmar (Popular Fiction, W’17) was recently one of eight writers selected from over four hundred applicants for Female Eye Film Festival’s highly competitive Script Development Program. Suri conceptualized her chosen screenplay (Demon Queen: A Tale of Good and Evil and All In-Between) at the Stonecoast MFA Program under the mentorship of James Patrick Kelly and Elizabeth Hand. On July 18, her screenplay had a public table read with professional actors and a panel of industry mentors (including award-winning film and television writer Karen Walton) providing feedback. Suri plans to develop her screenplay into a feature film.

Jonathan Pessant (Poetry, W’21) has a poetry chapbook coming out this November. Prisonegg, available for presale at Finishing Line Press, a book of “gone-ness.” The poems in this collection ask what is left. After basic training. After seven years as a guard at a maximum-security military prison. After a divorce. And after being discharged from the Army and heading home to Maine. What is left after this “gone-ness”? What was there before the “gone-ness”?

Marisca Pichette (Popular Fiction, S’21) was delighted to see so many familiar faces at ReaderCon in July! She spent time with fellow alumna Julie C. Day and past mentors Robert VS Redick and David Anthony Durham. Stonecoast was well-represented in the conference programming. Alumna Erin Roberts and former faculty member Jim Kelly were also in attendance!

Dyani Sabin (Popular Fiction, S’21) is thrilled to announce she is now represented by Lisa Abellera at Kimberly Cameron Associates. Their first project together is a science-fiction novel, which was born at Stonecoast, and an early excerpt of which appears in her thesis, “Iron Strategist.”

Patricia Smith (Poetry, S’08 | Poetry Faculty 2008-2012) was recently inducted into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.

Van life, influencers, scenes of horrible atrocities: what could possibly go wrong? We’re all running from something. Jacob Strunk’s (Fiction, W’06) story “Idylls” appears in the latest volume of Sometimes Hilarious Horror.

Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam‘s (Popular Fiction, S’13) debut horror novel Grim Root, pitched as a reality TV dating show vs. a haunted house, came out from Dark Matter Ink in June. She’s also working on a video game about B-level superheroes, Bad Heroes, which will start funding on Kickstarter in August.

Rhiannon J. Taylor/R. J. Howell’s (Popular Fiction, S’19) fantasy short story “Be Like Magic” was published by The Lorelei Signal. It is free to read online. Fun trivia: the final lines were the excerpt she chose to have read during her Stonecoast graduation ceremony.

Olive L. Sullivan (Fiction/Poetry, S’15) will be giving a presentation on collaboration in the arts at the Power of Words Conference by the Transformative Language Arts Network. The registration page is here, and the conference information page is here. Olive will also be offering several workshops this fall through the Spiva Center for the Arts in Joplin, MO.

Genevieve Williams’ (Popular Fiction, S’14) story “Song of the Water People” will be published in August in the Two Hour Transport 2 anthology from Fairwood Press. More details here. 

Fiction alum sid sibo (sidney woods, W’19) is excited to gather participants on August 4 for a morning workshop called Fiction Shift at Jackson Hole’s Center for the Arts. Using excerpts from recently published titles that qualify using sibo’s test for “critter lit,” the group will explore various ways to incorporate the agency of animals other than humans into our realist fiction, and then experiment in teams at doing it. This topic began forming during Stonecoast’s thesis writing, and emerged more fully in sibo’s debut novel, The Scent of Distant Family, out this September from Bison Books. See sidsibo.com for more information.

FACULTY  

Faculty member Ron Currie wrote about JD Vance and Hillbilly Elegy for The Hill. 

John Florio (Popular Fiction, Fiction, Creative Nonfiction Faculty | Fiction/Popular Fiction, S’07) and Ouisie Shapiro’s YA nonfiction book DOOMED: Sacco, Vanzetti, and the End of the American Dream has been nominated for the Garden State Teen Book Award by the New Jersey Library Association; awards will be announced in December. DOOMED was also selected for the Notable Social Studies Books list by the Children’s Book Council and given a Gold Standard ranking by the Junior Library Guild; it was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Bank Street Children’s Book Committee and by the School Library Journal, which calls the book a “masterpiece.” John is now working on an historical novel as part of his doctoral studies with the University of Glasgow.

Elizabeth Hand (Popular Fiction, Fiction faculty) received a special award at this year’s Shirley Jackson Awards ceremony, in recognition of her work in promoting Jackson’s legacy. Previous recipients were Joyce Carol Oates, Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin, and editor Ellen Datlow. Elizabeth was one of the writers asked by The New York Times to contribute her list of the ten best books of 21st century. Recent book reviews include Lev Grossman’s The Bright Sword for The Washington Post. Her short novel Wylding Hall has just been optioned by Fairvale Entertainment.

Raina J. León‘s (Poetry faculty) poems were recently published in the Landscapes of Belonging issue of Latino Literatures. Her work was also anthologized in the Latino Poetry anthology of the Library of America, edited by Rigoberto González. She also received news that her most recent collection of poetry, black god mother this body, has made its way all the way to the Casa de la Poesía and Casa de las Américas in La Habana, Cuba. This September she will be leading a panel on ancestral archives and writing at Furious Flower IV:  Celebrating the Worlds of Black Poetry and teaching a workshop for area youth in the Harrisonburg community (September 17-21). In October, she will be reading from new poems at the Dodge Poetry Festival, October 17-18. And this fall, she will be at work on a NALAC-anthology on the first 15 years of The Acentos Review with FlowerSong Press.