2008 News: Jan | Feb
2007 News: Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec

John Carpenter has a short essay on Garrison Keilor’s Web site. John has finished his residency requirements and is completing a novel. A journalist and former writer for the Chicago Sun, he has also published in the New York Times and other prestigious newspapers.

Kathryn Graves’s poem, “No More Masks,” will be published in the October issue of The Oak, a quarterly publication featuring poetry and fiction. “No More Masks” was inspired by the black and white photographs of Anne Sexton, taken weeks before her death, by her personal photographer, Arthur Furst. Kathryn, a second year student in Carlow’s MFA program, has studied with Mary O’Donnell in Ireland, and Ann Towsend in Pittsburgh.

Jane Candia Coleman, a fiction mentor in Carlow’s MFA program since its beginning, has been invited to participate in the annual Festival Kino in Magdalena, Sonora, Mexico. The festival honors the 17th century Jesuit missionary, Eusebio Kino who changed the face of the American Southwest and Sonora, Mexico with the building of churches, many of which are still in use, and with his contributions to agronomy and his geographical discoveries. The festival will be held on March 15, and continue with an international gathering of the arts, May 21-24.

Jane will give readings from her Pulitzer nominated book of poetry on Father Kino’s life, The White Dove. The mission church of San Xavier del Bac in Tucson is known to all as 'The White Dove,' and Kino laid the cornerstones for the church before his death. She has also been invited to Segno, Italy, Kino’s birthplace, as part of an international envoy which is pushing for sainthood for Kinbo.

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The poets Victoria Dym and Amy Sutton will be featured at the Choice Cuts Reading Series, Friday February 15, at the Slaughterhouse Gallery & Studios, 5136 Butler Street, Lawrenceville. The donation is $3. Victoria Dym is a graduate of Ringling Brother’s Barnum and Bailey Clown College, bachelor in fun arts-humility, and a bachelor of arts in philosophy, from the University of Pittsburgh. She is currently working toward her MFA in creative writing-poetry at Carlow University. She is a Screen Actors Guild member and has appeared in movies, on stage, television, radio and has had a stand-up comedy career. Her poetry has been published in various anthologies and the City Paper. She is the owner and operator of Zanzibar O2, a portable oxygen bar business, founder of The Sunnyhill Earth Day Committee, a Madwoman, and proud mother of daughter Sydney.

Amy Sutton received her MFA from Carlow University, and her first manuscript, entitled Tabloids, pays homage to Teri Hatcher, Clea Duvall, and the working class folks who are her everyday celebrities. Amy is a sound engineer for WYEP’s weekly poetry series Prosody, and the assistant editor of the 2008 Madwomen in the Attic anthology, Voices from the Attic. She teaches literature and creative writing at Carlow, and currently resides in Tarentum with her life partner Sherri.

Patricia Dobler Poetry Contest

This contest is open to any woman writer over the age of 40 living in the U.S. who has not published a full-length book of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction (chapbooks excluded).

The New York Times (Sunday, November 11, 2007) has a piece by Janice Eidus, "The Wanderer." Janice has been a fiction mentor in our MFA program and will be returning in January to give a reading from The War of the Rosens, her critically acclaimed new novel.

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Talking Steel Towns: The Men and Women of America’s Steel Valley, Ellie Wymard’s new book published by Carnegie Mellon University Press, is receiving great reviews. “This book should be under the tree of every family with a mill heritage. Read it with someone who remembers, if they’re still around. It can’t be read without affection, and probably some tears….” writes Dan Simpson, associate editor of the Post-Gazette, “Telling the tale of Pittsburgh and Steel,” October 10, 2007, B 7.

David Strait is writing the introduction to Talent Among Us, an anthology of Tennesse writers that will be published in spring 2008. David, from Jackson, Tennessee, is completing his final MFA residency.

Our MFA mentor for fiction, Anne Enright, has been named the winner of the Man Booker prize for her novel, The Gathering. The Booker is the highest award given in England and Ireland for fiction.

Anne has been a mentor for fiction and nonfiction in our Irish residencies since the beginning of the MFA program. Anne read from The Gathering for our group during the past June residency.

Carlow MFA students are fortunate to study with her.

Congratulations Anne. You make us all so proud.

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Fiction mentor Jane Candia Coleman’s third collection of poetry, The White Dove, has just been published by High Plains Press.

The poems – with accompanying footnotes – chronicle the life and achievements of the 17th century Jesuit missionary, Eusebio Kino, who changed the face of Mexico and the American southwest. Mathematician, cartographer, astronomer, agronomist as well as priest, Kino established a chain of missions and extraordinary churches, many of which still stand. The most famous of these, the San Xavier Mission in Tucson, is known as the “White Dove of the Desert.” Father Kino is a candidate for sainthood.

The White Dove is nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Fred Shaw's poem, "Sandwich Haiku," was featured in the poet's corner in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 8, 2007, p. B7.

Wayne Cresser's short story, "Glitter," won honorable mention for the Tennessee Writer's Alliance Fiction Prize, judged by Lisa Alther. He is invited to read it at the Southern Festival of the Book in Nashville, on October 13.

Janice Eidus' new novel, The War of the Rosens, is nominated for the Sophie Brody Medal, an award presented by the American Library Association to the "...author of the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature for adults published in the United States in the preceding year."

Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, is on the short list for the Man Booker award, the highest prize for fiction in Britain and Ireland. Anne has been a fiction mentor in Carlow's MFA program for the past three years. Great news!

Please join us in congratulating MFA candidate, Melissa Andre, whose poem, "The Ballad of Eve Arden," was selected as a Commended Prize winner in the Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse sponsored by Tom Howard Books. The poem will be published on the Winning Writers website, http://www.winningwriters.com . Melissa wrote this piece during her first practicum period in the MFA.

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Renata McCormish, MFA Candidate

• "Six Days in Barcelona" was accepted for publication in the inagural issue of Shakespeare's Monkey Revue, Vol. 1, Issue 1, this June (hard copy)
  
• "Friday's News" and "War Mirabilis" are currently featured on the Writers' Alliance page raising awareness about the crisis in Darfur (www.writersalliance.net) under the pen name Renata Emther.

Wayne Cresser, MFA Candidate

• Wandering Army has picked up another of Wayne's stories: "I'm Already There," to be published in issue# 121.
  
• Long Story Short has picked up a short story called,"Two for the Price of One," which will be published on August 7.
  
• The first ever issue of shaking like a mountain is live at http://www.shakinglikeamountain.com . (Wayne Cresser and Vito Grippi, eds.)

David Strait, MFA Candidate, had two feature articles printed in the May issue of On the Ball magazine in Jackson, Tennessee. It's a publication that covers high school sports in West Tennessee.

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Very good news about Janice Eidus, a mentor for fiction writers in our MFA program: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6443840.html?industryid=47159

Maureen O'Brien is this year's Patricia Dobler Poetry Award contest winner! Read more about Maureen >>more

Molly Prosser, an honors graduate in English from Penn State, received high praise from her MFA thesis advisor, Marion Winik, at her defense and public reading at Carlow on April 18: "Molly Prosser has just written her first book, a collection of poetry called Fourth River. The title refers to the legend that Pittsburgh has one more river than is commonly thought, that this one runs underground, sometimes with such ferocity and at such volume that is has to be released through the manhold covers. That beneath the energy and movement you can see — the visible rivers — is more energy and movement, are forces that drive the soul and yearn toward the light.

This is such a perfect metaphor for Molly's work. The three rivers — the surface energy are wit, a lyric colloquiality, a self-conscious, brash, even brassy femaleness. The fourth river is the dark one: a fleshy, bloody, carnal energy, something equal parts corned beef and bladder infections, dark urges and black humor. What a pleasure for us as readers to encounter a writer with this light a touch, this sharp and wide-ranging an eye, with sense of place so acute it makes her poetry a form of travel writing.

One of the distinctive qualities of the Carlow program is our emphasis on cross-genre studies. I was excited when Molly chose me, a nonfiction mentor, for her thesis advisor, because cross-genre energy has been so important to me in my own work. As we worked together on the free verse and prose poems of Fourth River, I had the pleasure of observing Molly's ongoing poetic discovery of her true voice: the voice of her heart and the voice of her mouth.

It has been my great pleasure to work with this exciting new American poet - so generous with herself in her work. It is just as she says in her poem "Topography of a Body": I am a Sunday dinner, a feast ready to happen, a full-set table waiting for the bell."

"Topography of a Body" by Molly Prosser
From her manuscript, Fourth River

If the truth of our childhood is hidden
in our boides, then mine lives in the tips
of my fingers, burnt from canning tomatoes
an salt-packing pickles, or the insides
of my nostils singed by the cinnamon
or clove or root beer extracts my mother
poured into the bublling surgar pots for hardtack,
or on my wrist where the scar still smiles
up at me from when my father's quick slash
at a venison roast caught my hand still inside
the carcass, holding back the entrails.

Hair the color of dishwater, skin
the color of a cut raw potato, lips pink
like boiled corned beef. I am a Sunday dinner,
a feast ready to happen, a fully-set table
waiting for the bell.

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Juilene Osborne-McKnight graduated in January of 2007 from the Carlow University MFA program. Since that time, she has accepted a full-time Assistant Professorship at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pa, where she will teach writing as well as Celtic and Native American studies. She will also direct the Craft and Story at DeSales Writing Conference and the Irish Study Abroad program.

The paperback of her fourth novel, Song of Ireland, will be released in May 2007. Osborne-McKnight has recently completed her fifth novel, a modern American magical realist novel entitled A Door of Borealis. Currently, she is working on a collection of short stories, Sisters in Story, which tells parallel myths from the Celtic and Native American worlds. Her writing partner on that project is historical novelist, Eileen Charbonneau (Huron/Shoshone), who is a relative to Sacagawea.

Osborne-McKnight continues to speak at conferences and festivals throughout the United States and was one of the featured authors at the Youngstown State University English Festival in Ohio in April and will be one of the featured authors (and performers) at the International Conference of the Historical Novel Society (HNS) in Albany, New York in June of 2007.

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