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NEWS & EVENTS

JUNE 2008

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FEATURED BOOKS

Adam Golaski's Worse Than Myself

Worse Than Myself, a collection of horror stories by Adam Golaski (MFA '05), is now available from Raw Dog Screaming Press. The stories, writes author Glen Hirshberg, "lure readers through deceptively familiar portals: rural roadside diners, uninhabited river islands, shadowed woods. But inside are worlds fresh and strange, haunted as much by loneliness as fear, where the living and the less-than-dead alternately terrify and cling to each other." For complete information, visit the book's web page here.

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean

Judy Blunt's Breaking Clean (Knopf, 2002) was recently mentioned by the Wall Street Journal as one of the five best books evoking the Modern American West. The list also includes books by Gretel Ehrlich, James Galvin, Geoffrey O'Gara and Terry Tempest Williams. To read the full article, visit the WSJ here.

Language for a New CEntury

Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond, a landmark anthology, providing the most ambitious, far-reaching collection of contemporary Asian and Middle Eastern poetry available, is now available from W.W. Norton. The anthology, co-edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, includes the work of 400 writers, including UM visiting poet Sarah Gambito and Creative Writing director Prageeta Sharma. For more information, visit the Norton website here.

Karen Volkman's Nomina

Karen Volkman's Nomina has been released from BOA Editions as part of their American Poets Continuum Series. Nomina, Volkman's third full-length collection of poems, Nomina is a book of sonnets, yet sonnets that "far from a tidy closed form ... are volatile, sometimes violent instruments, resounding with struggle and shock." For more information, and to read an excerpt, visit the BOA site here. To read the review of Nomina in Time Out New York, visit here.


THE PROGRAM

The English Department is pleased to welcome Prageeta Sharma as the new Director of Creative Writing. Prageeta comes to our department from visiting appointments at the New School University in New York, and a professorship in Goddard College’s low residency MFA Program.

She received her MFA from Brown and an MA in Media Studies from the New School for Social Research. Prageeta is the author of two books of poems, The Opening Question (Winner of the 2004 Fence Modern Poet’s Book Prize) and Bliss to Fill (2000); her third volume, Infamous Landscapes, is forthcoming from Fence this year. She also brings experience in advertising and public relations to the position.

The University of Montana's writing program began formally in 1966 with the establishment of the M.F.A. degree, and has been shaped and influenced over the years by the likes of Hugo, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and Leslie Fiedler. Today it is nourished by a talented, committed, and accomplished group of faculty-writers, as well as by an increasingly distinguished community of alumni. Together with the talents and accomplishments of our current students, this community is continuing the M.F.A.'s program as one of the oldest and most prestigious programs in the country.