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Dorothy Maxwell Goepel
2004
Dorothy, who received an M.A. in 2004, was awarded an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2009 for creative nonfiction work of exceptional merit. The work submitted is a collection of remembrances of her deceased mother and father, whom she remembers as a walking contrast in ethnicity and culture, as well as the place of her youth, a Mexican American neighborhood on the West Side of San Antonio, Texas. Since graduating from Miami, Dorothy has worked as a part-time instructor, most recently in the English Department at Northern Kentucky University, and since 2008 as a substitute Spanish teacher at Mount Notre Dame High School. A member of the Air Force Reserve, she served as acting superintendent of the 20th Fighter Wing Public Affairs Office, Shaw Air Force Base, Sumter, S.C., from Jan. 26 to March 27, 2009.
Sara Kaplan
2004
Sara, who graduated with an M.A. in poetry in 2004, completed her M.F.A. in Poetry in 2007 at the University of Idaho. She served as the Managing Editor of Fugue, University of Idaho’s literary journal. Upon graduating, she accepted a tenure-track English teaching position at Del Mar College in Corpus Christi, Texas where she teaches Creative Writing, Literature, and Composition and writes poetry in her spare time. She publishes in national journals such as the Antioch Review, Harpur Palate, Ruminate, LIT, and The Cincinnati Review, among others.
Brian Seidman
2003
Brian Seidman, who received his M.A. in 2003, will have a short story published by Simon & Schuster in their Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Volume 10 anthology. The book will be available in bookstores nationwide during the summer of 2007. Since Miami, he reports, “I’ve been working as the managing editor of NewSouth Books, a civil-rights focused trade publisher in Montgomery, Alabama. I’ve been thankful that I haven’t had to dig my car out of the snow as much down south, though it does get awful hot in the summertime.”
Jordan McMullin
2003
“I am currently working toward an M.F.A. degree in fiction at the University of Maryland. I am forever grateful for my time at Miami University. I learned more in two years than I would have thought possible, and I entered the M.F.A. program with a strong sense of myself as a writer.
“Miami University draws talented, committed writers to its M.A. program, and its dedicated faculty inspires them to become ever more thoughtful producers and critics of literature. Being a writer at Miami means more than rigorous workshops and literature classes; it means participating in a real community of artists and learners.”
Evan Kuhlman
2002
“…my first novel, Wolf Boy, which I started while at Miami in Keith Banner’s fiction workshop, is out and available at the major booksellers like Borders and Barnes & Noble, and maybe some smaller ones. It’s something kind of different, a novel and graphic novel in one. If you get the chance to check it out I’d appreciate any feedback. I also have a website where you can read excerpts and see sample illustrations: http://wolfboynovel.com. If you have any questions, like about finding representation, etc., fire away!”
Ramon Jones
2001
“It’s been a unique experience, living in the Land of Enchantment and the city of Clovis, which has a population of about 35,000. It reminds me of another state I'm familiar with—West Virginia—only without the mountains. The workload where I teach (Clovis Community College) is trying at times (five comp classes a semester) but I get to teach lit classes and I’ve started a creative writing group on campus called Ink Blots, so those things make life bearable, along with making a positive impact on a student’s life. In between, I work on my novel, which I hope to see in print sometime before I die. I miss Mother Miami—I had been associated with the university from the ages of fifteen to thirty—and all of the wonderful instructors and staff I met there, but you have to fly the coop sometime, right? People here often ask me why I came here and I tell them that sometimes you go where you’re needed. ”
http://www.clovis.edu/AreasOfStudy/Faculty/FacultyInfo.asp?instlf=jonesra
Christopher Coake
1995
Christopher Coake, who received his M.A. in Fiction from Miami, returned in spring 2005 as the creative writing judge and is now an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, was named the 2006 winner of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers ($35,000)
The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a novel or collection of short stories—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. The winner receives a cash award of $35,000, a stipend intended to permit a significant degree of leisure in which to pursue a second work of literary fiction. The Robert Bingham Fellow is also encouraged to become an active participant in the PEN community and its programs advancing literature, free expression, and the worldwide PEN community of writers.
The 2006 PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow is Christopher Coake for his collection of stories entitled We’re in Trouble (Harcourt).
The judges write in their citation:
“In all of these stories, and in practically every sentence that composes them, there is a germ of bland familiarity that, in Coake’s
hands, has been twisted into the strange, the new, and the alarming. The gesture of this twist is the book’s connecting theme. We’re in Trouble takes
its cues from the anxious world of cable news, the endless amber alerts and horrific car crashes, the adventure stories gone awry. Beneath the dramatic surface of these stories are all sorts of questions and reflections about our own voyeurism, about our own need for stories.”
2006 Judges: Thomas Beller, Heidi Julavits, and Victoria Redel
The PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowships have been established in memory of Robert Bingham, who died in 1999 at the age of 33, to commemorate his love of literature and his contribution to literary fiction. Bingham was the author of two well-received books (a novel and short story collection, both published by Doubleday) and served as the editor of the avant-garde magazine Open City. Carolyn Cooke, Jonathan Safran Foer, Will Heinrich, Matthew Klam, Manil Suri, and Monique Truong have all been Bingham fellows.
The 2006 PEN Literary Awards were presented in New York on Monday, May 22, at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
For more information contact Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, nick@pen.org
Eugene Gloria
1990
Eugene Gloria (MA 1990) published his second book of poems, Hoodlum Birds (Penguin) in March, 2006. In April, he gave a reading co-sponsored by Kundiman and the Academy of American Poets, at Verlaine in New York City. Also in April, Hoodlum Birds was reviewed in “Poet’s Choice,” Robert Pinsky’s column in the Washington Post. Gloria has been named the 2006-2008 Richard W. Peck Chair in Creative Writing at DePauw University, where he is an associate professor of English.
Creative writing graduate student Daniel Jones’s short story, “Lysistrata, Kentucky,” won an Associated Writing Programs Intro Journal Prize in Fiction. His first novel, Water, will be published by University Press of the South in fall, 2005.