DEPARTMENT OF CREATIVE WRITING News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

Writers’ Week 2019 brought keynote speaker Ayana Mathis and other visiting authors and publishing professionals to the UNCW campus for our 20th annual symposium.

See more at uncw.edu/writersweek.

Notables in The Best American Essays 2019 include:

1. Philip Gerard, “A Mighty Storm,” Our State, August 2. David Gessner, “Dangerous Ground,” The American Scholar, Autumn 3. Jillian Weiss (MFA ’16), “Awakening to Jake,” The Missouri Review, 41/4

Publication in The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses is awarded annually for works of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction published by literary magazines or small presses during the previous year. 2020 nominations include:

1. Dina Greenberg (MFA ’15) for “After-Florence, Rooftop Stigmata,” Split Rock Review 2. Anna Sutton (MFA ’13) for “Fertility with Multiple Diagnoses,” Booth

Best of the Net 2019 nominations include: 1. Sayantani Dasgupta, “Notes on a Day Job, or, How to Be an Adjunct Professor,” Blood

Orange Review 2. Stephanie Trott (MFA ’17), “As to the Manner Born,” Blood Orange Review

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

UNCW was well represented at the 2019 NC State Fiction Contest: Honorable Mention: Kathryn Barber (MFA ’18), “Sorry About Your Bird” Finalist: Courtney Justus (MFA ’22), “Flight” Finalist: Rachel Ranie Taube (MFA ’20), “Small Cogs” Rachel Ranie Taube was also a finalist in the 2019 Shorter Fiction Prize for her piece “A Girl Cawed.”

The annual Thirsty Tome celebration featured Jason Frye and Sayantani Dasgupta as keynotes readers, along with MFA students K.N. Flora, Agatha Roa and Matt Stephenson. Each read a piece from their work relating to this year’s theme: Food for Thought.

Nina de Gramont’s young adult novel The Distance from Me to You will be adapted to feature film, starring Sabrina Carpenter. Read more here, and here.

Philip Gerard was honored with a North Carolina Award—the highest civilian honor in the state—recognized for significant contributions to the state and nation in the field of Literature. More >

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

• An interview with Anna Lena Phillips Bell is featured on the Sewanee Review's blog. Her poems "Sheen" and "Against Stoicism" appear in the fall issue of the magazine.

• Her poem "Flowere and Are" kicks off the anthology A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia (University of Georgia Press, fall 2019). The poem is also featured at Southern Humanities Review.

• Three poems from her Endearments series appear in the winter issue of Southern Cultures.

• She has work in the Florida Review's winter 2019 special feature on erasure. • Her artist's book Charms for Hemlock was featured in The Art of the Fold,

Abecedarian Gallery's exhibit of artist's books featuring structures from book artist Hedi Kyle.

• And her book Ornament was featured in a WRAL roundup of North Carolina poetry.

Emily Louise Smith was profiled in Salt by Wiley Cash in ‘The Long Road to Overnight Success: From Poet to Publisher, Emily Smith Makes Her Mark with Lookout Books.’

Michael White’s essay, “Funeral in Barcelona,” about poetry, tyranny, and freedom, appeared in Scoundrel Time: He also published a sonnet and an essay about the sonnet form in North American Review. At the North American Review's 50th Anniversary Conference last April, White chaired a panel called The Resurgent Sonnet, and he opened the discussion by reading this sonnet along with the essay.

BFA senior Fairley Lloyd had an arts & culture article in the October issue of Wilma magazine. Read it at wilmamag.com/fantastic-four.

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

MFA student Lauren Fulcher won the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) New York 2020 Student Writer Scholarship with full tuition to the winter conference.

MFA student Courtney Justus’ piece “Some Distant Music” was recently published in High Noon. Her piece “Cinta” is forthcoming March 2020 with Press Pause Press (founded and managed by alumna Sofie Harsha, MFA ’19).

MFA student Cassie Mannes-Murray has a flash fiction piece about the birds & bees and the south in HobartPulp. She also sold her first represented book, an essay collection by Marissa Miller called Pretty Weird, at the end of December. Cassie is an assistant literary agent with Howland Literary, and represents Emma Bolden (MFA ’05). Read more here.

MFA student Jessica Nirvana Ram’s poem “Incantation to the Departed” appears at Barrelhouse—her first post-undergraduate publication.

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

MFA student Rachel Ranie Taube's short story "Starlight Beastling, You" appeared in Issue 64 of Hayden's Ferry Review. The opening chapters of her novel won an honorable mention from the Nan Snow Emerging Writing Award. She was recognized and participated in a reading at the C.D. Wright Women Writer's Conference in November. Rachel has also had a panel accepted to AWP'19: "Making a Career as a Lit Mag Editor." She'll be moderating a discussion with editors of MQR, the Paris Review, Shenandoah, and VQR.

Chelsea Tippett (BFA ’19) has a poem—written in Michael White’s CRW 420: Ekphrastic Poetry course in Spring 2019—published with The Ekphrastic Review. Read it at: ekphrastic.net/ekphrastic/i-try-to-peel-a-lemon-for-you-but-the-cuts-you-tore-into-my-hands-sting-like-wasps-all-over-by-chelsea-tippett

Kathryn M. Barber (MFA ’18) has accepted a full-time position as Lecturer of English at Mississippi State University.

Diana Clark (MFA ’19) shares, • “My fiction piece "Carolina Low" has been accepted for the Spring 2020 issue of

Foglifter Journal. • My poem "Girls' Night" was accepted for the October issue of Glass: A Journal of

Poetry. • My poem "Gardening" has been accepted by Yes, Poetry for The Queer Body issue. • …I've been appointed a 50% scholarship to attend a two week residency at Sundress

Academy for the Arts, in order to continue working on my poetry manuscript.”

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

Daren Dean’s (MFA ’03) new collection of short stories, I’ll Still Be Here Long After You’re Gone, released with CJ Press. Read the press release here, with some nice blurbs from George Singleton, Steph Post, and Michael Garriga.

Will Dean (MFA ’18) has accepted a full-time position as instructor of English at Johnston Community College in Smithfield, NC.

Nicola DeRobertis-Theye’s (MFA ’15) debut novel sold to Mary Gaule at Harper at auction. Set for publication in 2021, The Vietri Project follows a young bookseller who travels to Rome in the hopes of tracking down a customer who has placed mysterious orders over the years, only to find that she must face the complicated history of her family, and of Italy itself. Read more about Nicola’s career in publishing and her time with Lookout Books at ecotonelookout.org/the-future-of-publishing-nicola-derobertis-theye.

An excerpt of Evan Gray’s (MFA ’17) manuscript in progress, Shoe-Mouth Garden, was published in issue 18 of Dreginald. Evan shares “It's long and bends together lyrics, found texts from gardening manuals, Appalachian folklore and fiddle tunes, day dreams, hoax-based fiction, and a little bit of sci-fi.”

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

Kinzy Janssen’s (MFA ’19) essay, “Secession,” appears in About Place Journal. The theme of this issue (Volume V, Issue IV) is “Infinite Country: Deepening Our Connection to Place, Culture, and One Another.”

Keith Kopka’s (MFA ’11) first collection of poems, Count Four, won the 2019 Tampa Review Prize, and will be published in 2020 by the University of Tampa Press.

Katie Prince (MFA ’15) was awarded a 2019 Grants for Artist Project Award from Artist Trust, to fund a solo retreat to work on her second manuscript.

Called “a heady, action-packed debut from a promising author” by Publisher’s Weekly, Megan Starks’s (MFA ’10) fantasy novel House of Ash & Brimstone released with City Owl as Book 1 of the Gatewalkers trilogy. Megan was nominated in 2019 for a Writers Guild Award in Videogame Writing for Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. She is a senior narrative designer at Obisidian, whose The Outer Worlds landed 4 nominations at the 2019 Game Awards, including Best Narrative. Watch the trailer here—it has nearly 10 million views.

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

Laura Price Steele’s (MFA ’16) short story "this life of (y)ours" is the winner of the Montana Prize in Fiction and will be published in the next issue of CutBank. Her story "The Beasts Are All Around" was a finalist in Cream City Review's Fiction Contest and will be published in their winter issue.

Faydra Stratton (MFA ’03) has a short story "The Valentine's-Eve-Not-a-Date Photo Scavenger Hunt" coming out in Love On Main, an anthology of 10 short stories. Her contemporary young adult novel, Devil Springs, will release in April 2020. Both are available for pre-order with Filles Vertes Publishing.

Anna B. Sutton (MFA ’13) won the 2019 St. Lawrence Book Award with her poetry collection Savage Flower. It will be published by Black Lawrence Press in July 2021. Her aforementioned Pushcart-nominated "Fertility with Multiple Diagnoses" will be included in the upcoming print edition of Booth.

Emily Paige Wilson’s (MFA ’16) debut full length poetry collection Jalubí (her MFA thesis manuscript) will be published in May 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Her chapbook, Hypochondria, Least Powerful of the Greek Gods, will release in late 2020/early 2021 from Glass Poetry Press.

News & Accolades – 2019.Q4 (OCT, NOV, DEC)

Philip Gerard is a feature writer for Our State magazine, covering a new installment of the Decades Series each month with an article about the 1940s and ’50s. See more at ourstate.com/topics/arts-culture/history/decades-series.