#unlvmfa

Welcome back to school, Creative Writers, for another lovely semester at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas! Here are some updates on the summer travels, writing, publications, and jobs of MFA/PhD Creative Writing students and faculty at UNLV.

MFA/BLACK MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE PHD FELLOWS Michael Berger: Michael Berger, 2nd year poet MFA, will be presenting a paper this October on Victorian adventure literature and contemporary cities, for the annual Utopian Studies Conference in Montreal, Quebec.

Marianne Chan: The best part of my summer was driving to Wyoming with Clancy McGilligan to attend a friend's beautiful wedding and stop at Yellowstone National Park to visit the geysers and buffalo.

Shaun Christensen: I spent my summer writing and reading and soaking in the pool. Got through Inferno and Purgatorio by Dante while lounging on one of those pool floaties or bagging some rays on a tanning chair.  Also was published in a hand made art book, series of one hundred, based out of LA which was made by the brilliant Mirabelle Jones and contains thirty other artists pieces.  It's titled Res Extensa and you'll have to climb Mt. Charleston and follow some clues to locate a copy ;)

Olivia Clare: Olivia Clare's book of poems, The 26-Hour Day, was accepted for publication by New Issues. She had a short story--"Creatinine," which she edited in Louisiana with her mother's sweet cat by her side--in the summer issue of Southern Review. She also had a short story appear in Granta. In July, she returned to Vegas for a summer session French class. She thinks she would like a cat of her own someday, but that's a different story.

Jamison Crabtree: Jamison has been on a publication spree this summer! Poems from his Wolf!!! series appear in Whiskey Island Magazine, The Destroyer, Smoking Glue Gun, Printer's Devil Review, and Hobart Pulp. His manuscript "rel[am]ent" was awarded the Word Works' Washington Prize and will be published spring of 2015. Other poems by Jamison can be found in apt, The Ampersand Review, Juked, and The Offending Adam.  

Daniel Hernandez: Great summer! I spent three weeks in Buenos Aires where I participated in the Argentine Conference of Comparative Literature. After that I spent a month bouncing around Uruguay, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru -- where I met up with Brittany Bronson :)

Shaun Leonard: This summer I went to San Diego Comic Con and did a bunch of interviews for isitabicycle.com. We just got shortlisted for the Irish Blog Awards for Best Podcast and Best Arts and Culture Blog. I also went to Chicago and worked on the theatre adaptation of Claudia Keelan's O Heart. Here's a couple photos from SDCC. The last one is an artist's interpretation of Las Vegas that I saw at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Joleen Long: Joleen spent two months living in Asakusa, Tokyo, Japan. She visited shrines and temples, met her great aunt for the first time, saw Emperor Akihito, ate a lot of food (including an Owakudani Black Egg), and worked on (and finished!) the second draft of her novel.

Kayla Miller:  I finished my international component in Spain (mostly in Alicante, though I also visited Barcelona and, briefly, Madrid) through the University of Memphis' Talbot International Scholarship.  Alicante has a week-long Fiesta de San Juan for the summer solstice, which involves building foegueras throughout the town and burning them to the ground at the end of the fiesta.  I also traveled to D.C visiting my new niece, and visited the Grand Canyon for the first time.  Also I won 5Q's fiction e-chapbook competition with "See & Be Seen & Be Scene," had that published, and then discussed it on KNPR.

Matt O'Brien: A few years ago, a French publisher translated both of my books, actively promoted and sold them and didn’t pay me or my American publisher any of the advance or royalties promised in the contract. We looked into legal action, but the possibilities seemed limited. So I learned to live with the fact that someone had stolen my work and was selling it—and there was nothing I could do about it. However, finding myself in Spain and en route to Paris, while studying abroad through UNLV's MFA creative writing program, I decided to email the publisher. To my surprise, he responded. He said that he wasn’t going to be in town while I was there, but a package would be at my hotel when I arrived. Entering my room and opening the cardboard box, I found 500 euros (about $670) and a translated copy of each book. 

Derek Pollard: I scored AP English Literature exams for ETS again this past June in Louisville, KY.

On my drive back to Las Vegas, I stopped in Lawrence, KS, where I spent two days at the Spencer Memorial Research Library on the campus of Kansas University going through the entirety of the Ronald Johnson archives housed there as part of my ongoing research on Johnson (for my dissertation and other projects).

My paper "'O! nothing earthly save the ray': Dis-Unity of Effect in Edgar Allan Poe's Poetry" was accepted for presentation at the Fourth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference being held in Manhattan in late February 2015.

Poem publications: "The Green Door" was published in Issue 11 of Weave Magazine, "The Rain Alone" was published in Volume 3 Issue 1 of Burntdistrict, and "Joshua's Bright Lily" was published in the Josephine Quarterly. 

  Claudia and I also launched the latest issue of Interim, which features a long poem by recent BMI Emerging Writer Derek Henderson, among many others.

Becky Robison: This summer I had an internship at Les Figues Press in Los Angeles. I got to proofread manuscripts, spearhead social media campaigns, and write copy; they even let me attend their first Figues Camp for writers in Big Bear. Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of me working at Les Figues. I do, however, have a picture of my friend Mackenzie and me with Jeff Goldblum--make of that what you will. 

Brett Salsbury: I stayed in Vegas for most of the summer and worked at the Marjorie Barrick Museum, with a jaunt to Kansas mixed in along with a five-day camping trip around NV and AZ. A couple of friends and I camped out at Lake Mead, the Grand Canyon's North Rim, and Lake Powell, and did a lot of hiking. Other than that, I read and wrote like a literary fiend.

Rene Solivan: This summer I visited family in New York City and upstate NY, had three stories accepted for publication in The St. Ann’s Review, River Poets Journal and Black Denim, and took my 5 year-old niece to see the musical Cinderella on Broadway.  I’m pretty sure I enjoyed it more than she did.

FACULTY

Maile Chapman: I'm a longtime watcher of true crime investigation shows, so I was happy to interview veteran Las Vegas Metro crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary about how she uses forensics to put together crime narratives for her new series, Cold Justice (http://vegasseven.com/2014/07/01/yolanda-mcclary-cold-comfort/). Anthony Zuiker, creator of the CSI television shows, modeled the main character after her, and I also got to interview him, which will appear in SEVEN Magazine later this month. I also invented an alternate life of Joan Rivers for Trop Magazine, in a real review of a fake movie (http://tropmag.com/2014/the-funny-bitch-at-the-bingo-table-a-review-of-life-is-mean/). Plus, of course, trying hard to finish a novel...

Claudia Keelan: Claudia Keelan's verse-drama "O, Heart" is on Small Press Distribution's recommended list.  Her translations of the women troubadours,  Truth of My Songs: Poems of the Trobairitz, is forthcoming in the Spring of 2015.

Richard Wiley: How did I spend my summer?  Grousing over the problems of a difficult novel during the first part of it, then going fishing in order to forget it!  I still have the novel problems, but I don't seem to worry about them as much as I did.  

Doug Unger: This summer, Doug and his wife, Carola, took a quick trip to Paris and a slow drive to Provence and the Cote d'Azur. Doug became obsessed with the idea of buying an old boat in Villeneuve Loubet and establishing a UNLV MFA International "deckhand summer fellowship" before facing reality, returning home, and beginning work on a new (very short) novel, and refining some essays. One of these, "On Mentors: A Manner of Being" has just been accepted as a chapter for a collection to be published in 2015 by The University of Massachusetts Press, edited by Jeff Parker. The book currently cribs its title from Doug's piece: A Manner Of Being: Writers On Their Mentors. Doug considers his boat fantasy and this essay as somehow related. After all, doesn't every good writer at some point need to learn navigation?