It’s been a good week for alums–yesterday we announced that MFA alum Liv Mammone’s first poetry collection will come out next year with Game Over Books next August, today we can tell you that Ariel Francisco’s fourth collection, All the Places We Love Have Been Left in Ruins, is being released by Burrow Press this month!

In this collection, Ariel mourns his native Miami in this elegiac elegistic meditation on how home can be shaped by climate change and gentrification. Even more special, is that this is a bilingual edition–Spanish translations by Ariel himself appear beside the original English text.

Ariel is no stranger to the QC MFA blog–you may remember his poem in  The New Yorker–but you may want to check out our virtual alumni bookshelf to see just how many books our alums have published:

Visiting Professor Alaya Dawn Johnson has been chosen for the shortlist for the 2024 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction!

The prestigious Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction is an annual $25,000 cash prize given to a writer for a single work of imaginative fiction. Just ten books were chosen by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, with the final winner to be chosen by a selection panel of authors: Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado.

Each year, we invite a new writer to teach with us every year so that students can dive further into different aspects and genres of writing and get a fresh perspective on their work. Alaya Dawn Johnson has definitely continued in our tradition of great Visiting Professors! Her nomination for the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize, as well as her recent win of the Best Fiction for Younger Readers Award by the British Science Fiction Association, shows the kind of expertise you can expect from our faculty!

Congratulations to Alaya for this incredible nomination! We’re hoping for more good news when the final winner will be announced on October 21st!

That’s right, our very own Director, Jason Tougaw made the homepage of Salon this week with his article “Dems, listen to Eminem’s one-man culture war.”

Salon has been a trusted destination for progressive journalism since 1995, so Jason’s exploration of Eminem’s evolving political consciousness is the perfect piece to be number one this week in this essential publication!

You should go check it out right now:

https://www.salon.com/2024/08/30/eminem-slim-shady-democrats

MFA alum Chandanie Somwaru has just been named a recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.

The Poetry Foundation awards five Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships annually. Among the largest awards offered to young poets in the US, the $27,000 prize is intended to support exceptional US poets between 21 and 31 years of age.

The fellowships were established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly and expanded in 2013 with a gift from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Memorial Fund.

Chandanie won the Birdhouse Chapbook Prize from Ghostbird Press for Urgent \\ Where the Mind Goes \\ Scattered (2021) when she graduated, so we knew she was destined for great things. Her writing has been published in Poem-A-Day, Honey Literary, Solstice, SWWIM, The Margins, and other outlets.

Congratulations, Chandanie!

Our own Jason Tougaw has an interview in Psychology Today with Iraq War veteran Michael Ramos about Ramos’ memoir The After: A Veteran’s Notes on Coming Home. In the interview, Tougaw and Ramos explore writing for multiple audiences and other craft issues arising from depicting his experience as a soldier.

There’s a reason why Psychology Today listed this under their Emotional Essential reads! Go find out for yourself while you read the interview for yourself:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-elusive-brain/202408/a-soldiers-perspective

Our own Nicole Cooley is featured in LitHub’s “Six Poetry Collections to Read in July.” This list, curated by Rebecca Morgan Frank, has been crafted not just to bring you the best of the best of just-published poetry books but also to bring you places during these summer months, as Morgan Frank puts it “New Orleans and small towns in Virginia and Michigan; the varied landscapes of California; Jeju City in Korea; and where we all meet up far too often: cyberspace.”

Who doesn’t want to travel on the cheap? Head over to LitHub to hear about Nicole’s latest book of poetry, Mother Water Ash, and all the places you might go this summer, thanks to your local bookstore:

A big congratulations to MFA alum Liv Mammone, who is the Poem-a-Day on the Academy of American Poets website!

Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series of the Academy of American Poets featuring over 250 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year. torrin a. greathouse is the guest editor of July.

This is fresh off the heels of Liv being selected as the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day back at the end of June, so you know that Liv’s upcoming book, Fire in the Waiting Room (Game Over Books, 2025) is going to be much acclaimed.

Go read (or listen) to Liv’s poem now:

https://poets.org/poem/fear-2

MFA alum John Rice just had a piece published by McSweeney’s Internet Tendency this morning, a review of the 7-Eleven french toast breakfast sandwich, under their Reviews of New Foods section.

McSweeney’s Publishing is a non-profit publishing house based in San Francisco, California, founded by author Dave Eggers in 1998. In addition to their daily humor website, McSweeney’s also publishes approximately ten titles a year, as well as the quarterly literary journal Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The bimonthly magazine The Believer, Illustoria (an art and storytelling magazine for six to 11-year olds), and, formerly, the legendary food journal Lucky Peach.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is considered one of the most preeminent publications for literary satire and humor, so a big congratulations to John is in order!

Go check it out now, and think about it every time you are near a 7-Eleven:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/7-eleven-french-toast-sandwich-with-sausage-egg-cheese-and-chipotle-bacon-mayonnaise-dressing

We just got some excellent news today: MFA student Richard Prins has been selected for The Best American Essays 2024. Richard, fresh off the heels of winning an NEA Fellowship, had his essay “Because: An Etiology” selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and acclaimed New York Times critic Wesley Morris.

The Best American series selects twenty essays out of thousands of nominations from literary journals which represent the best examples of the form published the previous year. Each year an established writer is brought in to act as judge for this prestigious anthology, but is presided over by series editor Kim Dana Kupperman at HarperCollins.

The anthology officially publishes towards the end of October, so you can preorder your copy now. Or, you can read Richard’s inventive essay “Because: An Etiology” in the Potomac Review.

Congratulations, Richard!