Jon Marc Smith’s novel, Make Them Cry (Ecco 2020, co-authored with Smith Henderson), was translated into French and published by Belfond Noir as Fais-les Pleurer in Spring 2023.
John Blair’s seventh book, The Shape of Things to Come—Poems, which chronicles in verse the beginnings of the atomic age, has been published by Gival Press and is now available on Amazon, Barnesandnoble.com, and Givalpress.com.
Debra Monroe’s essay “Last Home,” which first appeared in Air / Light magazine, has been cited as Notable in Houghton Mifflin’s annual anthology Best American Essays 2023.
Cyrus Cassells’s The World That the Shooter Left Us was recently named a poetry finalist in this year’s Housatonic Book Awards.
Whitney May’s essay, “Gol o Bolbol Go Viral: Iranian Protest Songs in the Age of Social Media,” appears on PopMatters. On October 30th, Whitney May gave an invited address at SUNY Old Westbury’s annual horror conference. This talk was over Pennywise’s literary origins and the future of insurgent clowning at political protests.
Third year MFA poetry student Cathlin Noonan’s poem “On Marriage: A Fasting” will appear in SWWIM Every Day on November 8, 2023.
Rob Tally gave three conference presentations recently. Rob was the keynote speaker for Mapping Spaces and (the) US, a conference sponsored by the Romanian Association for American Studies and Romanian–U.S. Fulbright Commission at Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania; his presentation, “Unmappable America: Space, Cosmopolitanism, and the Crisis of Representation,” was delivered remotely. Rob presented “Great Goblins: The Representation of the Orc in The Hobbit at the online Northeast Popular Culture Association conference. And Rob presented “‘I’m as Mad as Hell, and I’m Not Going to Take This Anymore’: Anger, Critique, and the Culture Wars” at the annual conference of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts (SCLA) in Philadelphia (the theme of the conference was “Anger”). Also, as of October 7, 2023, Rob is now the President of the SCLA, which will hold its 2024 conference in Austin.
Two of MFA graduate Melissa McEver Huckabay’s poems appeared in literary journals in October: “The Worried Woman Odes” in Thimble Literary Magazine and “Elegy for a Promise Ring” in Sweet: A Literary Confection.
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