Category: 2022 Alumni News

Zoe Maki’s piece “Nitrogen Narcosis” was accepted this year to Lost Balloon, and another piece, “When My Girlfriend’s Head Becomes an Orange in the Middle of the Night,” recently appeared in Invisible City. Both pieces were part of Zoe’s MFA thesis.

Zoe Ballering has won the 2022 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Short Fiction from the University of North Texas Press. The winner of the prestigious prize receives $1000 and the publication of their collection. There Is Only Us, which began as Zoe’s MFA thesis, will appear this fall.

Jaima Lindell loved attending Western, and when she had the opportunity to move back to Bellingham last April she was thrilled to be part of the community again. A few years after graduating, she traveled to New Zealand where she worked and lived on the Working Holiday Visa and met her husband. They moved to Australia on the same visa for a year before coming back to the states. Not long after that, she fell into a career in project management, obtaining her certification in November 2020, and she now works for a digital marketing company in Bellingham. She has not strayed too far from her degree, however. For the past ten-plus years, she has been writing a fantasy novel. It is now in the editing phase and she hopes to release it later this year through Earth and Fire Publishing, an up-and-coming Seattle-based indie publisher. Jaima maintains an active blog that includes more details about her novel in progress.

Kathi Ciskowski is at work on a historical piece about a mysterious epidemic that struck Bellingham in the late summer and fall of 1913. Newspapers from all over the country wrote about it, but there were conflicting diagnoses as to the actual cause of the trouble. Around a dozen people died, mostly children. In-depth research on Kathi’s part has not yet revealed the culprit, but she is still engaged with the project!

Sarah Maloney’s comic “Stolen” was published on The Rumpus in April of this year.

After graduating from Western, Dan Langager worked as a broadcast reporter in Wenatchee. In January of this year, he took a new job in a new sector as the Technical Communications Manager at the Northwest Horticultural Council, a non-profit trade association that works on behalf of the tree fruit industry of the Pacific Northwest and is based in Yakima. He still uses the skills he gained from his English and Journalism degrees every day.

In the spring of 2022, Keegan Lawler published an essay in The Offing titled “Smalltown Boy.” It is about the song of the same name covered by Orville Peck and originally by Bronski Beat.

Cindy Hollenbeck recently celebrated ten years as an employee at Washington State University, eight as a marketing and communications coordinator, and four as a senior writer. She remembers being challenged by her education at Western, and she knows the degree she earned here made a positive impact on her career. She is so grateful for the time she spent in Bellingham and at the university, and she has maintained many wonderful friendships with faculty and peers.

Joanna Nesbit stayed in Bellingham after graduation, having married someone who had just relocated here for a job. She works as a freelance writer, both content marketing and journalism, and appreciates every day the writing skills she gained at Western. She has two grown kids, one working on a Ph.D. in ecology at the University of Arizona, and the other graduating this summer from Western with a degree in economics and math.

George Drew is the author of nine poetry collections, including most recently Drumming Armageddon, which appeared in 2020 from Madville Publishing. In addition, he has a new chapbook, Hog: A Delta Memoir, coming out from Bass Clef Press, and a book of essays titled Just Like Oz that is likewise coming out from Madville. George has won awards such as the South Carolina Review Poetry Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award, the Adirondack Literary Award, the St. Petersburg Review Poetry Contest, the Knightville Poetry Contest, and, in 2020, the William Faulkner Literary Competition. In 2019 he collaborated with singer/songwriter Rick Kunz on a CD of original poetry and songs entitled A Triumph of Loneliness, KBW Music.