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:

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: