CWP 2017-2018 Newsletter

CWP 2017-2018 Newsletter

2017 NEWSLETTER Inside: Program News.........................4 Faculty News ...........................5 Student News ..........................7 Readings, Publications and Community ....................11 Alumni News .........................21 Dr. Antonio D. Tillis Dean, CLASS Dr. James Kastely English Dept. Chair Alex Parsons CWP Director Giuseppe Taurino Assistant Director From the Director Fellow writers, desire to rekindle your romance with the gorgeous, single Recruitment this year is and available CWP, give thought to in-kind donations arguably the best indicator if the strictly transactional isn’t for you. We are open to of the state of the Program. proposals and propositions, advice and suggestions. And Virtually every top appli- please send us your news, be it professional, literary, or cant we contacted, cajoled, familial. e-stalked, or otherwise pressured is attending. This fall we launch our first large, lecture-style sophomore We’ll welcome 16 writers Creative Writing class. Seven faculty will collaborate to our singular communi- on the lectures, and the class will be co-taught by three ty. They join in large part graduate students. The course is a template for others because of the rigorous and aimed at expanding the number and variety of fiction and collaborative tone set by our students and faculty, as well as poetry classes our graduate students can teach. We’ve also the success of our recent and long-standing graduates. This soldered together a shiny new Creative Writing Minor. year and last we bade goodbye to a number of (employed!) Any student at UH can side-car this to their major field creative writing professors, and enjoyed the work of many of study. It should open the vista and byways for a whole students and graduates, whether bound and bearing a pub- new spectrum of young writers. Our undergraduates lisher’s impress or inked on the pages of The New Yorker. now have one of the best slates of classes, professors, and resources among any university. In midst of general As promised, we expanded our website and online pres- and depressingly usual cuts, our new dean has pledged ence because we ran out of storage space for the clay tab- $10,000 in annual funding to the undergraduate literary lets. You can peruse the curated existence of the CWP via journal Glass Mountain and the Boldface Writers’ Con- the Roy G. Cullen and UH Creative Writing Facebook pag- ference, in tacit recognition of our curricular quality. And es, Instagram, and the blog we share on the Inprint site, the our undergraduates are publishing: one has a collection of latter thanks to Inprint’s generous crash-couch policy. On short stories contracted with Riverhead and another was the subject of their support, Inprint provided 14 incoming a finalistfor this year’s Nelson Algren Prize for fiction. In students with $10,000 grants and has underwritten half of the Cynthia Macdonald Graduate Assistantship in Arts short, we are soon to arrive at an undergraduate program Administration. Fifteen of our incoming students are also that mirrors the quality of the graduate program. fully funded at between $25-35,000 this year (this includes coverage of tuition & fees, health insurance, and a teaching What does the future hold? A concerted effort to pub- assistantship; also pep talks). Such support is a high-water licize our program’s excellence. An on-going effort to mark for the Program, and egalitarian in its division and ensure the financial well-being of our students. A trend in disbursal. There are always threats to our funding, however, the MFA toward interdisciplinary studies. Perhaps a sum- and we look to you for help as we foster new, reasonably mer residency program? (Anyone have a villa? Anyone?) debt-free writers. Whatever the outcome of these, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to the vibrant state of the CWP, Many of you teach throughout the country. We would like which makes all futures possible. to rely on you to promote the CWP to deepen our pool of recruits and otherwise benefit With thanks, from a happy symbiosis. If you gave us the slow fade but Alex now recognize a repressed, nascent, or blooming 3 Program News The Archival Impulse In this project- / process-based course we used the collaborative art space Alabama Song as a lab to examine the concept of the ARCHIVE as both an imaginative as well as a generative site. Students investigated the idea of the ARCHIVE through artist pre- sentations and readings. Throughout the semester each student developed and created [either solo or as a collaborative group] a series of ARCHIVES [alternate, personal, imaginative, unofficial] which sprang directly from their existing creative practice. As a final project one ARCHIVE was distilled, refined, and contained in either a book / performance / film / installation / website, etc. Visiting artists included: Regina Agu (A Living Index), Raphael Rubenstein / Heather Bause (The Miraculous), Mel Chin (Funk and Wag A to Z), Mariam Ghani (Index of the Disappeared), and Paula Matthusen (Field Recordings). The co-teachers of the workshop were Gabriel Martinez and Ron- nie Yates. Readings included: Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse; Jacques Derrida, Ar- chival Fever; Martha Rossler, The Bowery in Two Inadequate Descriptive Systems; Pad Ma, 10 Theses on the Archive; John Tagg, The Archiving Machine; Alan Sekula, The Body & the Archive. 4 Faculty News obert Boswell’s story her writings, titled Feminism and Diaspora: Critical "O" will appear in The Perspectives on Chitra Divakaruni, will be published Atlantic in October, later this year in USA and India. Her novel Palace of Rand he has a story coming Illusions has been optioned for a movie. out in the anthology Houston In the summer of 2016, Nick Flynn formed a Noir. Recent stories also band, Shaker Flynn, with Simi Stone (The New appeared in The Ploughshares Pornographers) and Philip Marshall (KILCOOL), Omnibus and Telluride in response to the murder of Alton Sterling by the Magazine. He judged the Baton Rouge police. Shaker Flynn has performed Hopwood Drama Prize for in several venues in New York and New England, the University of Michigan, including The Omega Center and The Boston and he will lecture at the Book Festival. In Warren Wilson residency in February 2017, July. he presented Audrey Colombe presented on difficult Blake & the students in the creative writing classroom at Apocalypse in the Creative Writing Studies Organization London and (CWSO) Annual Conference in Asheville, Manchester North Carolina. As faculty advisor for (UK) with Glass Mountain Magazine, she oversaw the Sarah Lipstate publication of Glass Mountain #18—as well (Noveller) on as the 10th anniversary of the magazine— experimental which included a reading and launch as part of guitar, alongside films the UH Libraries’ 2016-2017 Poetry and Prose by Houston’s Gabriel series. The annual Boldface Conference, held Martinez (Alabama Song). in May, welcomed many new writers—local A book of poems, I Will and national—and brought in CWP alums Destroy You, is forthcoming Bill Broun, Leah Lax, and Hayan Charara from Graywolf Press. as featured writers. Audrey is currently working on an article based on Tony Hoagland has two the CWSO conference books of poems forthcom- presentation and ing: Priest Turned Therapist also a handbook for Treats Fear of God in 2018 undergraduate literary from Graywolf Press and Recent Changes in the Vernacular from Tres Chicas Press. magazines. His poems have appeared this year in the Paris Chitra Divakaruni's novel Review, Ploughshares, The Sun Magazine, Amer- Before We Visit the Goddess ican Poetry Review and elsewhere. An interview has been translated into Polish with former U of H graduate student Katie and Italian. A scholarly work on Condon can be found in Grist: The Journal for 5 Writers from the University of Tennessee. He current- their work alongside critical essays, interviews, letters, ly has two bumper stickers on his car: “Ask Me photographs, and other ephemera. About Iron-Deficient Anemia,” and “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”. Martha Serpas was back at Tampa General Hospital this May offering workshops in In February, Incognegro, the integrative care and poetry. She published critically acclaimed graphic poems in Plume and The Golden Shovel novel professor Mat Johnson Anthology in honor of Gwendolyn Brooks. created with illustrator War- Her nonironic poem “Joy” appeared in ren Pleece, will be re-issued Fogged Clarity’s special Inaugural Issue. She on it’s tenth anniversary read “Ode to the Passion Mark” with UH alum by Dark Horse Comics, Dave Parsons, co-editor (with Wendy Barker) along with an entirely of Far Out: Poems of the 60’s at Brazos. (For the new monthly mini- se- record, Martha may have been a bit late to that ries. The new storyline, particular revolution.) Incognegro: Renaissance, Spring visits by Alicia will be a prequel origin Ostriker, Ellen Bryant story set in Harlem Voigt, and Aliki Barn- during the 1920s. stone were highlights of the year for her as Antonya Nelson is working on a book of essays well as a mid-Novem- about dogs (tentatively titled One Dog is People), a ber trip with a double kind of memoir told with dogs as the centerpiece of handful of students to each part, to be published by Bloomsbury. attend the American In November, Academy of Religion’s Graywolf Press Annual Meeting in San will publish Mar- Antonio for a dose of tha Collins’ and post-election analysis Kevin Prufer’s POE MS, and activism. EnglishTRANSLATIONS, Into English: Po- COMME N TARIES ems, Translations, Into English Roberto Tejada has Commentaries, Into Edited by Martha Collins & presented from his work on contemporary Kevin Prufer an anthology of art and media from the U.S. and Latino essays on the art America in lectures that include “Family of translation.

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