CURRENT STUDENTS

Kim Autrey’s (Popular Fiction) short story “Parfum,” written under her pen name of Kim Castle, has been accepted by The Yard: Crime blog and will appear this month.  

ALUMS 

Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s (Creative Nonfiction, S’15) natural history memoir The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is having a delightful time frolicking with other animal memoirs in a recent New York Times article “A Hare, a Fox, an Owl, a Snail: Animal Memoirs Are Going Wild” by Alexandra Alter. 

Peter Adrian Behravesh (Popular Fiction, W’18) is thrilled to announce that he has joined Wizards of the Coast as a Story Game Designer for Magic: The Gathering, where he will be working on all things Magic Story.

Melanie Brooks (Creative Nonfiction, W’15) will be joining forces with former Stonecoast faculty member Suzanne Strempek Shea from June 16-20 in Rockport, ME, at Maine Media College, to bring you a transformative workshop on writing about health and trauma. For more information and to register, click here. 

Negative Girl (Datura 2024) by Libby Cudmore (Popular Fiction/Creative Nonfiction, S’10) was named as a finalist for the International Thriller Writers (ITW) award in “Best Standalone Mystery.”

Teri Elam’s (Poetry, S’19) had screenplays to finish as a 2025 SAGIndie semifinalist and Atlanta Film Festival quarterfinalist. You can find her poetry book review for Jennifer Bartell’s A Traveling Mercy in the recent issue of Callaloo, and her poetry manuscript, Digging Thru The Bones, was a 2025 Perugia Press finalist.

Barbara P. Greenbaum (Fiction, S’05) is thrilled to announce that her short story collection Go Out like Sunday and Other Stories is now available for pre-sale through Main Street Rag. This collection of sixteen short stories features a cast of characters facing moments of decisive change. From a bullied boy in high school, to a couple coffin shopping, the folks in this book face the challenges of what it’s like to live in a world they often can’t control or understand. Betrayal, loss, violence, grief, and yearning dance with the joy of new directions as these characters, like the rest of us, navigate their own complex worlds.

Jeff Kass (Fiction, S’09) will read from his new poetry collection True Believer (read a short write-up about Jeff and his book here) on the following dates in April:

• Thursday, April 3rd, 7:00 p.m., at Pioneer High School in the Little Theater, 601 W. Stadium Blvd., Ann Arbor MI 48104.
• Friday, April 11th, 7:00 p.m., at the Dzanc House in Ypsilanti, 402 S. Huron St., Ypsilanti MI
• Friday, April 18th, 7:00 p.m., via Zoom for the general public
• Thursday, April 24th @ the Great Lakes Poetry Festival, 7:00 p.m., 217 N. Front St., Marquette MI, 49855

True Believer is also available at Target.

Nina B. Lichtenstein (Creative Nonfiction, S’20) is excited that her forthcoming memoir is now on Goodreads, and is super appreciative if folks interested add it to their “Want to Read” and IF someone would like to review it or rate it on Goodreads ahead of its pub date (May 27th), even better! Mucho gratitude! Also, fun fact is that the next Maine Writers Studio Lit Salon & Open Mic on April 23rd, is ONLY OPEN MIC this time around, so more time for more people to step up to the mic and share. Welcome all to 165: The Inn on Park Row in Brunswick. More info here.

Acree Graham Macam (Fiction, W ’25) is excited to continue supporting The Rumpus in her capacity as assistant prose reviews editor, working under inimitable Stonecoast grad J Brooke. Acree also appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books this month, interviewing author Nicole Graev Lipson about her debut essay collection, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. 

Nadja Maril (Fiction, W’20) is pleased to share that her creative nonfiction essay “Is It Authentic?”—inspired by her earlier career as an antiques dealer and appraiser—was recently published in Across the Margin. Her flash CNF piece “Shopping Day” is in the Spring Warmer issue of Frazzled Lit. published online and also read by Nadja. As a founding member of Old Scratch Press Poetry and Short Form Writers’ Collective, she continues to serve as the Creative Nonfiction Editor for Instant Noodles Literary Review and is hoping for more submissions from the Stonecoast Community. Upcoming themes for submissions are Sanctuary, followed by Gravy. 

Julia McKenzie Munemo (Creative Nonfiction, S’16) is so honored to share her craft essay On Writing About My Children in The Masters Review, in which she discusses the line—so known to CNFers—between telling the truth and violating the privacy of the people we love the most.

Laura Navarre (Popular Fiction, W’11)released her spicy standalone witch academy MMF menage Virgo Queen, a queer-friendly Little Red Riding Hood retelling for grownups about what happens the night Little Red gets the wolves. Virgo Queen is an alternate POV entry point to Laura’s Amazon bestselling Dark Witch Academy why choose series, whose final book releases this year. 

Jenny O’Connell (Creative Nonfiction, S’17) premiered Follow The Water—the short documentary of her 100-mile kayak expedition down a vital Maine watershed with outdoor photographer Andy Gagne to raise awareness for clean drinking water—to a full house at Allagash Brewing last month. The 17-minute film, professionally shot by Maine Mountain Media, is now available to the public here. The event included a poetry reading of “Love Letter to a Wild Maine River” by Mihku Paul (Fiction, S’10) and a reading of a personal essay Jenny wrote about their adventure, which can be found here. Jenny will be drawing from her experience on this project to teach a seminar on alternative storytelling at the Stonecoast residency this June.

Ellie O’Leary (Poetry, W’17) will attend the Finding Your Memoir in Your Life Story retreat in early May in Tuscany, Italy, as a teaching assistant. 

Marisca Pichette (Popular Fiction, S’21)had a fantastic time at ICFA 46 with fellow alumni Dyani Sabin (Popular Fiction, S’21), Beth Anderson, Summit Osur, Nina Barufaldi, Liz Levin, and Lucas Carroll-Garrett (Popular Fiction, W’22). She is delighted that Every Dark Cloud is now officially out in the world! You can find this cli-fi novella wherever books are sold.

Astronomia, Nitasia Roland‘s (Popular Fiction, W’19) 6th Indie Deck and Book project, was published this month by Urania Press. It is an Oracle Deck and Guidebook featuring research and interpretations on Planetary Magic, the Zodiac signs, Planets, Luminaries, Asteroids, and Comets; learn more here. Nitasia has also published Emblemata: Decoding Magical Symbolism with Weiser Books and the pre-orders are available on Amazon. Also, pre-orders are also available for Nitasia’s latest Indie deck and book project: Sublime Thresholds: Unlocking Mythopoetic & Archetypal Codes of the Sublime with Evocative Baroque, Romantic, Gothic & Symbolist Paintings. This project was conceived and based upon Nitasia’s 2019 Stonecoast MFA thesis, titled “The Endurance of the Sublime: Tracing the Significance and Effects of the Sublime from Eighteenth-Century Romanticism to Contemporary Literary Horror and Ecogothic,” which you can read on her blog. Learn more about Sublime Thresholds here. You can further learn about these projects here.

Interviews keep coming long after a book launches, and sid sibo (sidney woods; Fiction, W’19) has added the most recent Cowboy State Daily to the press page at sidsibo.com. Fun pictures include this staged poke at Wyoming’s insistence on using a “Cowboy State” image rather than anything that could reflect the early Women’s Rights Movement that earned the state the OFFICIAL nickname of the Equality State.

Adrienne S. Wallner (Poetry, W’09) will be Artist-In-Residence at LOLA Arts in Land O’ Lakes, Wisconsin, for the month of April. During this time the LOLA Gallery will exhibit “Acrylic & Ink,” an exhibit of her poetry in conversation with the paintings of her grandfather Philip Richard Stock. She will also present an artist talk at the opening of the exhibit on April 10, teach a generative poetry class to high schoolers, and host a Poetry & Prose Open Mic. For more info, visit LOLA.  The words on the image below are an excerpt from one of Adrienne’s poems, inspired by the painting pictured.

FACULTY  

Aaron Hamburger‘s (Fiction, Creative Nonfiction) essay “Mount Sinai and Me” appears in the new anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible,out this month! Aaron will also be in conversation with Jennifer Haigh about her wonderful new novel Rabbit Moon at Politics and Prose in DC, Sunday, April 13. 

In scriptwriting news, Elizabeth Searle (Fiction, Scriptwriting) is featured by Women in Film & Video-New England in their Member Spotlight as part of International Women’s Month in March. In other film news, Elizabeth’s feature film script, A FourSided Bed, won Best American Screenplay at the Best Script Competition-London, and it is an Official Selection at AREA51 Film Festival, 2025 and a Finalist for Best Drama Screenplay at Yeti Film Festival (Iceland).