Our own program director, Jason Tougaw, has written a piece for Psychology Today about Asher Young’s immersive art installation Living Memory, which allows people to visit with holograms made from photographs they submit of departed loved ones.

The result is another step in the evolution of how media and technology can not just assist us as we grieve, but actually shape how we remember those we’ve lost. Tougaw describes his encounter with one of these holograms and explores how this experience can be both painful and a joy in his piece.

If you’ve lost someone, maybe you should read it too:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-elusive-brain/202411/twenty-first-century-grief

We are so excited to announce that the winner of this year’s Birdhouse Prize is MFA alum Richard Prins, for his manuscript, We May Eat Fruit. The chapbook is not available yet on the Ghostbird Press website, but we wanted to let you all know the good news right away!

You may remember that, just this year, Richard has also been included in The Best American Essays 2024 and won an NEA Fellowship, so we’re overjoyed Richard was able to add this as the capstone to a great year!

Ghostbird Press is a small, independent chapbook press that publishes collaborations of writing and visual art. Peter Vanderberg, a fellow QC MFA alum, offers the annual Birdhouse Prize to graduating QC MFA students, resulting in a gorgeous full-color chapbook for the winner.

Winning a chapbook prize with your thesis is only one of the great opportunities you only get as a QC MFA student. Discover more on our Opportunities page!

Our own Professor Briallen Hopper has just published a personal essay for Public Books called “A Tale of Two Graduations,” based on her experience attending two People’s Graduations last spring: one for Columbia and one for CUNY.

In Hopper’s description of the events, we can see the class inequities that have divided the city’s college students for some time:

“Columbia’s was held at the largest church in North America, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, a beautiful bastion of Gothic architecture and WASP wealth.

CUNY’s was held by the basketball court at St. Nicholas Park in Harlem, in front of a weathered chain-link fence.”

But we also see how both ceremonies were acts of joy and a testament to the students who organized and participated in these events.

Last year’s People’s Graduations, for those who don’t know, were independent commencement ceremonies organized by faculty and staff members from schools in response to the punishment of students who participated in pro-Palestine campus protests. I know this is a sensitive and complicated issue for a lot of people, let alone for members of the QC community, but no matter what your stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict is, I feel we all can appreciate these ceremonies and this essay as a testament to the resiliency of our students that are willing to stand up for their constitutional rights of free speech and peaceful protest.

We hope you read it with this in mind:

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:

It’s official: MFA alum Liv Mammone’s first book of poetry, Fire in the Waiting Room, is coming out with Game Over Books next August!

Although this is her first collection, Liv is no stranger to publication, having been included in five different anthologies since her MFA, as well as being selected as Poem-a-Day on both the Academy of American Poets website and The Poetry Foundation.

After her MFA, Liv competed team for Union Square Slam as the first disabled woman to be on a New York national poetry slam team and appeared in the play The Fall of All Atomic Angels as part of a festival that was named Best of Off Off Broadway by Time Out Magazine. We were already super proud of her, and we continue to be overjoyed by her success!

Liv is just one of our many success stories here at the Queens College MFA Program. If you’d like to learn more about our alumni, please head to our community page: