Elizabeth Conway was a runner-up in the Southeast Review's World's Best Short story contest. Her story, "When the Sky Fell in Washington," will appear alongside J. Robert Lennon's (also a runner up) in the fall issue of Southeast Review. Sarah Gridley's first book of poems, Weather Eye Open, has just been accepted for publication by the New California Poetry series. Shannon Bryner Hale (Fiction 2000) has sold three young-adult fantasy novels to Bloomsbury US & UK. The first one, The Goose Girl is due out this September. Her author site is www.squeetus.comPoetry M.F.A. Melissa Kwasny's book, Toward the Open Field: Romantic and Post Romantic Essays by Poets on the Art of Poetry, will be published by Wesleyan University press in the spring of 2004. Mandy Smoker-Broaddus (M.F.A. 2003) will have her first collection published by Hanging Loose Press (Cambridge, MA). Siobhan Scarry's poem "By Water" was chosen as Editor's Choice in the 2003 Fineline Competition and will be published in the upcoming fall issue of the Mid-American Review. She also made finalist in Indiana Review's 2003 prose poetry competition. Amanda Eyre Ward's (Fiction '97) novel, Sleep Toward Heaven came out from MacAdam/Cage Publishing, an independent trade publisher based in San Francisco and Denver, in the spring of 2003 and is doing very well, in reviews and in sales. Word has it that Liza Ward (Fiction 2002) has sold the novel she was working on here to a major publisher for a nice advance. More word on that when we have it.