Here’s what Spalding MFA students, alumni, faculty, and staff have been publishing, producing, and doing since our last update!
— STUDENTS—
Theresa Anne Carey’s (SW) first-semester screenplay, The Lady Pirates (aka Boundless as the Sea), written under the tutelage of Spalding mentor Gabriel J. Dean, was a Top-Ten Finalist in the 2017 ScriptFest Screenwriting Competition and is also
an Official Selection in the 2017 London Independent Film Awards, a Finalist and Official Selection in the 2017 Oaxaca FilmFest Screenwriting Competition, and one of 35 other finalists competing for the Oaxaca FilmFest Best *
Perfect Page*. Most recently, The Lady Pirates won Best Feature Screenplay (student category) in the Hollywood Hills Screenwriting Competition.
Taylor Riley (CNF) is a first-year student and a journalist at The (Louisville) Courier-Journal. An essay of Taylor’s was recently published on Refinery29 for its Take Back The Beach contest. Four CJ articles were also published recently in USA TODAY: “Amelia Earhart’s lost evidence might including info from Kentuckians”, “Kentucky Lottery Winner Alone Penniless”, “You Won’t Want to Win”, and “Can You Start to Plan Your Trip Now, 2024 Eclipse”. In July, Taylor attended the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference in Grapevine, Texas, on the George Getschow Scholarship, awarded by Spalding University. You can read her daily articles at Courier-Journal.com or follow her on Twitter @TaylorRileyCJ.
Troy (T. E.) Wilderson’s (F) short story, Mother’s Day, will be published by Crack the Spine in Issue 225. Troy’s story will be included in her work-in-progress short story collection Telling Stories. Her full credits can be viewed on her website: tewilderson.com. She is @MizGolightly on Twitter.
— ALUMNI—
Brandi Bradley’s (F ’14) short story “The Tournament” was published in Juked on July 23. Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Creative Writing at Florida State University and crafts tweets about her REDNECK KID @bebebradley via Twitter. For more information, visit brandibradley.com or follow her at bbs_books_and_boots on Instagram.
Brooke Bullman’s (F ’15) short story “Found Objects” was a finalist for the Nelson
Algren Literary Award and was published in the Chicago Tribune Life & Style section in June. You can read the story here http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/literary-awards/ct-algren-award-finalist-found-objects-by-brooke-bullman-20170609-story.html and learn more about the annual contest and other winners here. http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/literary-awards/ct-algren-winners-061117-20170609-story.html www.brookebullman.com
Nivi Engineer (F ‘15) recently celebrated the publication of two of her stories. The short story version of her novel, Picklemas, was published in the 2017 issue of Belletrist Magazine. And her speculative fiction tale, Redrafted, was published in the July 2017 issue of Lyonesse magazine. Her blog posts can also be found regularly on the GeekMom blog, where she is a Core Contributor. Connect with her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, though she primarily frequents the first. Author of The Indian Girl’s Definitive Guide to Staying Single, The Story of a Story, and The Saviors of Scarborough
Jeffrey Fischer-Smith‘s (PW ’17) and Julie Nichols‘s (SW ’15) short film
“
Reservations”, starring Dale Raoul and Ray Thompson, directed by Todd Felderstein, and co-written with Todd Felderstein, had its world premiere in Hollywood on August 14 at the Stella Adler Academy Hollywood Short + Sweet Film Festival.
Annie Frazier Crandell (F ’17) was awarded Honorable Mention in the 2017 James Applewhite Poetry Prize for her poem “Severance”. Two more of her poems, “Farm Nights and Driving with Lucretius”, were finalists in the contest, and all three will be published in North Carolina Literary Review in 2018. For more information about the contest and NCLR, click here. Follow Annie on Twitter @anniefrazzr and learn more about her work at http://anniefrazier.wordpress.com.
Alice-Catherine Jennings (P ’14) is pleased to announce her poem “Watching a Clown Frogfish Feed” was selected to be part of the anthology Along the Shore by Lost Tower Publications. In April, she was selected to be in a Poetry Master Class with Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales and UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at Ty Newydd in Wales. This was followed by an artists’ residency at the Guapamacátaro Center for Art and Ecology in Michoacán, Mexico. For more information on these international opportunities, send her a note at alicecatherinej@gmail.com.
Alice-Catherine Jennings (right) with fellow artists at a local museum in Maravatío, Mexico
Marci Rae Johnson’s (P ’05) poems appeared recently in Whale Road Review, “Archaeoptery“, “Ink & Letters“, and “Relief“, and her poem “3D Printed Meat: It’s What’s for Dinner” will appear in Rhino in 2018. She was also a featured reader at several conferences/colleges, including the Windhover Writers Conference at Mary Hardin Baylor University, Bluffton College, and Eastern Mennonite University. Marci Rae Johnson Blogspot
Savannah Sipple (P ’08) was recently awarded a grant from the Barbara Deming Fund/Money for Women, Inc. to support her poetry manuscript “WWJD & Other Poems“. Savannah is also the co-owner of Lexington, Kentucky’s newest independent bookseller, Brier Books. You can check them out online at www.brierbooks.com and consider contacting them to host a reading, pop-up shop, or event.
AJ Sterkel (W4C ’16) has a creative nonfiction piece, “We Stayed Silent”, published in the young adult and children’s online journal YAmmering. Check out AJ’s blog or follow her on Twitter @AJSterkel. YAmmering is founded by Janelle Fila (W4C ‘17), with the goal of talking persistently, and often loudly, about YA and children’s fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, illustrations, and authors. For submission information, please check out the website or follow YAmmering on Twitter @Yammeringlit.
— FACULTY & STAFF —
Dianne Aprile (CNF) read two of her poems, “Some Birds Line Their
Nests with Leaves“ and “Deconstructing a Book”, at the launch of the most recent volume of The Raven Chronicles, a Washington-based literary journal. The two poems were published in the journal’s special section on the theme of “Home.” Dianne also taught a 6-week collaborative class on Collage & Text with visual artist Larry Calkins at Kirkland (WA) Arts Center and will conduct a weekend retreat on Collage Writing & Art with Calkins in Harlan, Oregon this fall.
This summer, Susan Campbell Bartoletti (W4CYA) presented at the National Archives in Washington DC and led a master class in nonfiction at the Highlights Foundation. With her co-editor Marc Aronson, she’s completing the final touches on the 1968 nonfiction anthology, to be published by Candlewick in 2018. She and Aronson are busy plotting the next anthology endeavor. She continues to research and to write her next full-length nonfiction book.
Julie Brickman’s (F) story “The Rampvan, the Skateboard & the Wheelchair” was published in the Summer, 2017 issue of Persimmon Tree.
Kathleen Driskell (P) was reappointed for the 2017-18 academic year as Faculty Representative to the Spalding Board of Trustees. Her craft essay Meaning Making for Poets recently appeared in The Writing Craft: A Creative Writing Textbook for Beginning Writers of [Non]Fiction and Poetry by C.E. Cardiff. Kathleen emceed the Spalding and 21C Voices and Vision reading Young Writers Take the Mic on Thursday, August 17. She is invited to read at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky, on Thursday, September 21, at 7:30 pm, and she will lead a cross-genre workshop Exploring the Short Braided Memoir during the Writer’s Block Festival in Louisville, October 17, 1:45 – 3:45 p.m. For more information, click here.
Roy Hoffman (F/CNF) was prose writer-in-residence Aug. 12 – 19 at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY, leading a workshop, The Wellspring of Memory, and giving a reading and a lecture, Tell It in Fact: The Allure of Creative Nonfiction. Two of Roy’s books have been reissued in paperback
by University of Alabama Press: his novel, Come Landfall, and his nonfiction Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations. Roy presented both books in talks at the courthouse of the Monroe County Museum in Monroeville, Alabama, June 13, 2017, and Page & Palette bookstore, in Fairhope, Alabama, July 20, 2017.
Fenton Johnson’s (F) new and selected essays “Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays” is recently out from Louisville’s Sarabande Books and is receiving rave reviews: “Unapologetically smart and visionary, Everywhere Home: A Life in Essays is simply required reading” — Lambda Literary Journal “[Fenton Johnson] never settles for cliché or platitude, but instead grasps the full span of life’s emotional output—the good, the bad, and the utterly painful that he himself is a product of—and manages, beautifully, to derive hope.” — East Bay Review
Greg Pape’s (P) long poem “Road Trip with Lulu” is forthcoming in Miramar No. 6. A sequence of Ghazals written in collaboration with Debra Kang Dean (P) entitled “Parallel Parking” appeared in the online publication THE GHAZAL PAGE: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE GHAZALS.
ROBIN LIPPINCOTT (F) is serving as a judge for the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for the eighth time. For those who have published a novel, a book-length collection of short stories, or a minimum of three short stories in journals with a national distribution (digital-only publication and self-publication do not count toward this requirement), check it out for next year here.
Fiction faculty member John Pipkin’s (F) latest novel, The Blind Astronomer’s Daughter (Bloomsbury 2016) is now available in paperback. In researching his next novel, Pipkin learned to build a steel bicycle frame by hand earlier this summer, and he took the bike to Poland on August 12 to attempt a solo ride from Warsaw to Paris, 1100 miles in 15 days. You can follow his ride on: Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pipkinjohn Twitter http://www.twitter.com/john_pipkin Instagram https://www.instagram.com/johnpipkin/ http://www.johnpipkin.com
Want to see what else the Spalding MFA family has been up to lately? Check out more updates here: Life of a Writer.
FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT OUR PROGRAM, STUDENTS, AND FACULTY, PLEASE VISIT SPALDING.EDU/MFA OR EMAIL US AT MFA@SPALDING.EDU.