Program News
The last two academic years have been both full and productive for the Creative Writing program at Miami. Change, transition, growth, accomplishment. You want it, we’ve had it. Here are some of the high points.
Fiction writer Margaret Luongo, multi-media poet cris cheek, and experimental poet Catherine Wagner have all joined our full-time creative writing faculty.
Luongo, whose story “Mrs. Fargo” appears in the summer 2005 issue of Fence, is at work on a novel. cheek’s recent activities, in conjunction with his collaborator Kirsten Lavers, include interventions in community radio in Cambridge, UK. More recent work with his TNWK collaborator Lavers is described at http://www.textfestival.com/. cheek and Keith Tuma were among the writers performing at the summer 2006 Cork International Poetry Festival in Ireland as part of events surrounding Cork’s turn as European culture capital. An anthology Wagner is editing is forthcoming in May of 2007, and her third book is scheduled for publication in 2008.
Long-term faculty members, fiction writer Constance Pierce and poet James Reiss, retired in the spring of 2004. They are sorely missed. Constance left for warmer climes, while Jim remains in Oxford. In fact, he returned to teach during the spring semester of 2005. Poet Annie Finch resigned in the fall of 2004 to become the director of the Stonecoast Low Residency MFA in her beloved state of Maine.
The completely revised undergraduate creative writing curriculum continues to attract majors. At the end of the spring semester in 2005, there were 278 undergraduate majors, up 10% in one year and 57% since 1999.
The graduate program has grown, too, especially in the richness of our offerings. In addition to our well-established concentrations in poetry and fiction, as of 2005 prospective M.A. students may apply for our new pilot track in creative non-fiction.
It’s been a wonderful period of publishing, both for faculty members as well as current and former students.
Faculty member Kay Sloan’s second novel, The Patron Saint of Red Chevys, was published by Permanent Press in the summer of 2004. Her poetry chapbook, The Birds Are On Fire, won the Finishing Line Press New Women’s Voices Award for 2005.
Eric Goodman’s fourth novel, Child of My Right Hand, published by Sourcebooks in October, 2004, won second place in ForeWord Magazine’s 2004 Book of the Year Award for Gay/Lesbian Fiction.
A selection from Brian Roley’s novel, American Son, was chosen for the California Council of the Humanities 2005 statewide reading series, “California Uncovered: Stories for the 21st Century.” A new anthology of 20 CA Writers (from Joan Didion, John Steinbeck and Maxine Hong Kingston, to more contemporary writers like Richard Rodriguez, Chitra Divakaruni and Brian Roley) is being read in libraries and classrooms across the state as a follow up to the statewide “Reading The Grapes of Wrath” program.
Former graduate students Bret Johnston (2000) and Christopher Coake (1997) each published their first collections of stories. Bret, who teaches creative writing at California State University, returned to Miami in October, 2004, to read from Corpus Cristi, which was published by Random House and has won the Texas Institute of Letters Debut Fiction Award. Christopher Coake, who teaches creative writing at the University of Nevada, Reno, returned to Miami in April, 2005, to read from We’re In Trouble (Harper Collins), his award-winning short story collection.
Evan (Petee) Kuhlman, who received his M.A. in 2002 sold his first novel, Wolf Boy, to Random House. This novel grew out of a story written in a Miami workshop, and was published in 2006 with illustrations by comic artists Brian and Brendon Fraim.
Recent M.A. program graduate Daniel Jones sold his first novel, Water, to University Press of the South. The opening chapter of his second novel, Lysistrata, Kentucky, won a 2005 AWP Intro Journals Prize in Fiction, and will be published in Controlled Burn.
Adrienne Miller, Miami ’93, who spent nearly nine years as literary editor of Esquire, published her acclaimed first novel, The Coast of Akron (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and returned for a campus reading and workshop visits.
Heather Burns Skyler (1991) returned to Miami to read from her first novel, The Perfect Age, just published by Norton. All We Can Handle, a one-act play written by Andrew Dainoff (1994) , was included in New American Short Plays 2005, and produced in summer 2006 by Cincinnati’s New Play Collective. For news of other former undergraduates, see our Alumni Updates page.
OxMag, our award-winning graduate student-edited literary journal, went online in 2004.
Meshworks, the Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance, also went online in 2004. Meshworks is a site dedicated to documenting and preserving video and sound recordings of writing in performance, and features .mov & .mp3 documentation of writing by Miami poets and many others, including Mairéad Byrne, Lisa Jarnot, Bernadette Mayer, Tom Raworth, and Tyrone Williams.
The Miami University Press, formerly a poetry-only press, published its first collection of short fiction in 2005, The Mayor of Roses by Marianne Villanueva. In 2006, MU Press published a major anthology of contemporary African American poetry, Rainbow Darkness, with new poems and essays by participants in the Cook Diversity in African American Poetry Conference held at Miami in September, 2003. The Press sponsored its first Novela contest in 2005, publishing the winning entry, Albert Sgambati’s The Waiting Room, in 2006.