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Dear Sister Killdeer

Listen to the Spring 2013  MFA thesis readings.

Programs of National Distinction

Creative Writing is one of three top programs at The University of Montana that was recently named a Program of National Distinction (PoND) by the Office of the Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs. With this distinction, additional funds will be added to the Creative Writing Program's base budget--most of which will be used to increase student support. TA salaries will go up, and the CutBank Editor position will now be fully-funded. “UM’s Creative Writing Program is one of our nation’s oldest and most prestigious writing programs,” Director Judy Blunt said. “PoND status will afford us a competitive edge in terms of recruiting the most talented students and will help us maintain our place in the top tier of creative writing programs nationwide.”

  Spring 2013

  • Kerry Banazek (MFA 2011) was named a finalist in the 2013 Sawtooth Poetry Prize for her manuscript Torrents and Groundviews. Dan Beachy-Quick also selected Lauren de Paepe (MFA 2013) for her manuscript The Seeker Loves the Burden as a semifinalist for the prize.
  • Judy Blunt's essay, "Occupying the Real West," in New Letters, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
  • Jeff Whitney (MFA 2012) and Sheila Black (MFA 1998) both have poems in Watershed Review.
  • David Allan Cates' (MFA 1992) novel, Ben Armstrong's Strange Trip Home, won a Gold Medal for best fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.
  • Asta So (second year MFA) was awarded a grant from the Matthew Hansen Endowment Fund to research a nonfiction piece called, "What to Eat: The History and Evolution of Asian Cuisine in Western Montana."
  • Carrie Laben's (MFA 2013) short story, "A Shot of Fireball," will be published in the anthology Handsome Devil.
  • April Wilder (MFA 2006) has been busy since graduating. She was awarded the McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Then she became a PhD candidate in Creative Writing/Literature at The University of Utah. Now she has her first collection of stories coming out with Viking/Penguin in January 2014: This is Not an Accident. Her forthcoming novel is called I Think About You All the Time, Starting Tomorrow.
  • Alice Bolin's (MFA 2011) poem, "Jawbreaker," and Michael Earl Craig's (BA 1994) poem "For Marcel, My Index Finger," are both published in Bat City Review.
  • Molly Laich's (MFA 2011) story, "Black Dog, White Rhino," is published in Spork Press.
  • JP Kemmick's (first year MFA) story, "The Outer Reaches of Love," is published in BarrelHouse.
  • Melissa Kwasny (MFA 1999) will read from Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision (Lynx House Press, 2013) on Saturday, April 27, 5 p.m. at Shakespeare & Co., downtown Missoula.
  • Noel Thistle Tague (MFA 2012) has a lyric essay, "Gypsy Witch Fortune Telling Playing Cards," in the current issue of the Black Warrior Review, a poem, "Housefires," upcoming in Salt Hill 31, and an essay on Erin Mouré forthcoming in translation from La Mariposa Mundial.
  • Candie Sanderson (first year MFA) has four flash fiction pieces upcoming in BlazeVOX. She also has two  book reviews, one published in the Journal of Southeast Asian American Education, and one in Metamorphosis.
  • Rachel Finkelstein (first year MFA) has a review of Kate Durbin's chapbook, Kept Women, published in Lemon Hound.
  • Ed Skoog (MFA 1996) and J. Robert Lennon (MFA 1995) have a new issue of Lunch Box: Nuclear Truffle.
  • Scott Alexander Jones (2009) is moving to Lawrence, Kansas to start a PhD program in creative writing this fall.
  • Greg Pape's essay, "Finding Levine" is published in Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine (Prairie Lights Books, Iowa, 2013).
  • English faculty member, Casey Charles, has a book of poetry recently published with Seven Kitchens Press -- Blood Work.
  • Elisabeth Geier's (MFA 2011) story that she read for her thesis, "It's the Mud, It's the Mud," was published in Painted Bride Quarterly, Issue 86.
  • Trina Burke (MFA 2008) has a new poetry chapbook, Wreck Idyll, with Dancing Girl Press.
  • John Myers (MFA 2010) has two poems from the Griffith sonnets coming out in the spring issue of Lungfull.
  • Zan Bockes (MFA 1990) will read from her poetry collection, Caught in Passing, on Friday, April 26, 7 p.m. at Fact & Fiction, downtown Missoula.
  • Prageeta Sharma will read from her new book, Undergloom, on Sunday, May 12, 4 - 6 p.m. at Shakespeare & Co. in Missoula.
  • John Bennett (first year MFA) has been accepted at the 2013 Frost Place Poetry Seminar. He also has four new poems in the Spring 2013 issue of The Manila Envelope.
  • Joshua Fomon (third year MFA) has accepted an internship with Senator Harkin in Washington DC for the summer.
  • Congratulations to the new MFA student genre editors for CutBank: Asta So, Brenden Oliva, Maud Streep and Candie Sanderson (fiction), Rachel Finkelstein, Kate di Nitto, Philip Schaefer and John Bennett (poetry) and Kate Nitze and Kimberly Bell (nonfiction). Rachel Mindell is the new Editor-in-Chief.
  • Theodore McDermott's (MFA 2011) story, "The Minor Outsider," appears in Vice.
  • Emma Torzs' (MFA 2012) poem, "The Comet," is featured on Verse Daily.
  • Jennifer Duffield White's (MFA 2012) poem, "On Confluence," appears in the Spring 2013 issue of Witness.
  • David Gates' story, "An Actor Prepares," is in The Paris Review.
  • Molly Laich (MFA 2011) was interviewed in Midwestern Gothic Issue 9.
  • Alice Bolin's (MFA 2011) essay, "The Methodless Method: On the Teen-age Quotation Fetish," is in The New Yorker's March 26 Page-Turner Blog.
  • Dana Fitz Gale (third year MFA) has a story in the new issue of Arts & Letters.
  • Laurel Nakanishi's (MFA 2013) collection, Manoa Makai, was chosen by Kimiko Hahn as the winner of the 2012 Epiphany poetry chapbook contest.
  • Youna Kwak (MFA 2008) and Sarah Gridley (MFA 2000) both have poems in the Spring 2013 issue of Cerise Press.
  • Andrew Martin's and BJ Soloy's (second year MFA) play "Salvage" was accepted by the Ten Minute Play competition and will be performed at The University of Montana on April 18 & 19.
  • Wynne Hungerford's (undergraduate creative writer) story, See Wonderful Things, appears in the Spring 2013 issue of The South Carolina Review.
  • Catherine Theis (MFA 2001) was accepted into the Creative Ph.D. at USC with a Provost's Fellowship (30k stipend for 5 years, first 2 years without teaching).
  • Greta Wrolstad's (MFA class of 2006) posthumously published collection, Night is Simply a Shadow, is available for pre-order from Tavern Books.
  • Congratulations to Joanna Klink, one of the eight winners of the 2013  Award in Literature ($7,500) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
  • Caitlin Stainken (first year MFA) has stories appearing in The Lantern (spring 2013 issue) and an anthology called Tales of the Undead (summer 2013).
  • Jeff Whitney (MFA 2012) has poems forthcoming in Salt Hill.
  • Robert Stubblefield's essay, "October," is forthcoming in Basalt.
  • BJ Soloy (second year MFA) has three poems forthcoming in Ghost Town: "Big Howlin' Blind Monet & His Mud-lily Wolfband," "Of Bang & Blab," and "The Coast of Old Barbary." His poem, "Tableaux Vivants," will be published in the upcoming issue of New American Writing.
  • Kim Zupan's (MFA 1984) novel The Ploughmen is forthcoming with Holt, spring 2014.
  • MFA 2012 graduates Clint Garner, Kate Rutledge Jaffe and Jeff Whitney have started Peel Press, an independent literary press dedicated to identifying and nurturing genre-bending literary work. Their first title, Ken White's poetry collection Eidolon, will be released this spring. Visit www.peelpress.org for more information.
  • Philip Schaefer's (first year MFA) poem "Dram" is forthcoming in Litconic. His poem "Ornithology" is going to be published this spring in 14 Hills.
  • John Bennett (first year MFA) has poems forthcoming in Concho River Review and The Manila Envelope.
  • Carrie Laben (third year MFA student) has two short stories "The Fledglings of Time" and "Bad Penny" that will appear, respectively, in the anthologies Zombies: Shambling through History and Shades of Blue and Gray: Ghosts of the Civil War, both coming in August of this year from Prime Books.
  • Jordan Rossen's (second year MFA) story "Dust" is forthcoming in Reed magazine.
  •  read more news items here....

Featured Books

The Oval: Staff Edition

The Oval, volume 6, has just been published. The 2013 staff edition is also now available online.

 Rough DayEd Skoog (MFA 1996) celebrates the publication of his second collection of poetry Rough Day (Copper Canyon Press), with a reading and party at the Hugo House in Seattle on Thursday, June 13, 7 pm.

Four Swans

Greg Pape's new collection of poetry, Four Swans (Lynx House Press) is full of mature poems; meditative, curious poems about the world of wild mountains and streams, about death and blessing, about the resonant past that is with us yet.

EidolonMFA 2012 graduates Clint Garner, Kate Rutledge Jaffe and Jeff Whitney have started Peel Press, an independent literary press dedicated to identifying and nurturing genre-bending literary work. Their first title, Ken White's poetry collection Eidolon, will be released this spring. Visit www.peelpress.org for more information.

PortugueseWhile on the bus to elementary school in a small New England town, Brandon Shimoda (MFA 2006)—the offspring of a Japanese American father and white mother—was taunted for being “Portuguese.” Shimoda’s latest collection, Portuguese, returns the author to a moment he felt challenged to become what he was being called, however falsely. The presiding struggle in this collection is with poetry itself—the form and its impulses, and the act of writing. But Portuguese is more than all these things. It was—and is—an act of preservation, giving form to the energy that makes up some part of our memory. -- Bookish

Caught in Passing

Zan Bockes' (MFA 1990) first book of poetry, Caught in Passing, has been published with Turning Point.
“Zan Bockes’ original voice captivates with music, rhythm and resilience, with such precision of memory, it’s time travel. This work is living proof that poetry is salvation.”                     —Sheryl Noethe

UndergloomTaking its title from the descent into Hell in the opening passage of Homer’s Iliad—“and crowded brave souls into the undergloom”—Prageeta Sharma's fourth collection of poetry chronicles personal and internal wars using the American frontier as a central metaphor to address questions of community and belonging, outsiderness, and the inevitability of a racialized self. Undergloom will be released with Fence Books June 11, 2013.

Earth Again

"Earth Again is an arresting, beautiful collection of poems. Chris Dombrowski (MFA 2001) is musical and intellectual in equal measure, and the poems here are memorable in every way--surprising and strange, moving and alarming, delightful and frightening. This is important new work." -- Laura Kasischke

Lake People Abi Maxwell's (MFA 2009) Lake People is a haunting, luminous debut novel set in a small New Hampshire town: the story of the crisscrossing of lives, within and without family, and of one woman, given up for adoption as a baby, searching for the truth about her life.

Earth Recitals      Melissa Kwasny's (MFA 1999) Earth Recitals is a profound meditation on vision as both a dimension of art and a spiritual practice. What is it to see? What is it to create an image? What is it to live in a way that opens the heart and mind to vision? Kwasny explores these questions through lyrical responses to a range of artists and writers, from the anonymous makers of ancient rock paintings to Morris Graves, from H.D. to Leslie Marmon Silko, among many others. This beautifully written book expresses in every sentence the life of care and vision it does so much to illuminate.  --Robert Baker

 Emily Ruskovich

Emily Ruskovich (B.A. 2007), currently a McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, landed a double book contract with Random House. Her story collection, tentatively titled Idaho, will appear in 2013; look for her novel-in-progress, also from Random House, a couple years down the road.