Christa Rohrbach (MFA, 2020) received second place in Blood Tree Literature‘s first-ever hybrid contest.
BA, 2019: Catherine Sebastian
Catherine Sebastian (BA, 2019) is currently in her third quarter at Woodring College of Education working on her Masters in Teaching degree. Recently, she was awarded the Technology Access Foundation’s Martinez Fellowship. The Martinez Fellowship supports teachers of color in professional and career development through a network of educators.
BA, 2005: Rena Priest
Rena Priest (BA, 2005) is a 2019 Jack Straw Writer, and recipient of a National Geographic Explorer Grant. She will be reading at Village Books on July 7th to promote the anthology, For Love of Orcas.
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s Your Body a Bullet, a collaborative book with alumna Elizabeth Vignali, was published by Unsolicited Press in November 2018. She presented “Immensities” at the PMLA conference, a poetry project that seeks to honor women who’ve been murdered in Whatcom County. Her poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction appeared in various journals including SWIMM, Ghost City, Stirring, Hippocampus, Threadcount, Permafrost, A-Minor, and Contrary, received six Best of the Net nominations and two Pushcart Prize nominations, and will be included in three anthologies: Mansion, by Ghost City Press, and Ways of Looking, by Carve, and the Running Wild Novella Anthology, by Running Wild Press.
Dayna Patterson
Dayna Patterson’s chapbook, Titania in Yellow, is forthcoming in 2019 (Porkbelly Press), and her full-length collection of lyric essays and poetry, If Mother Braids a Waterfall, will meet the world in 2020 (Signature Books). She recently gave a reading in Salt Lake City sponsored by the Sunstone Foundation. This past year, she received three Pushcart nominations and was a finalist for Best of the Net. She won second place in the Eugene England Memorial Essay Contest for her piece “Fledge.” Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, AGNI, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, North American Review, Cave Wall, and others. She was awarded a 2019 SAF Mineral School Fellowship, and she continues her work as Editor-in-Chief of Psaltery & Lyre, an online literary journal that makes its home at the intersection of faith and doubt.
Christopher Wise
Christopher Wise’s À la recherche de Yambo Ouologuem (Paris: Les Èditions Philae, 2018) was selected as La Livre de la Semaine [Book of the Week] by Africa No.1 Radio in Paris, France. He also translated Jean-Michel Djian’s The Manuscripts of Timbuktu: Secrets, Myths, Realities (Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 2019), which was launched at the “Global Africa, Migration, and the Arts” Conference at Rutgers University at a panel honoring Kassahun Checole and Africa World Press on March 28, 2019. Wise was a plenary speaker at the conference and spoke on the topic of “Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence at 50.” Wise also published an article “Après Azawad: Le devoir de violence, djihad, et idéologie chérifienne dans le Nord du Mali” in Fabula/Les colloques: L’oeuvre de Yambo Ouologuem: Un carrefour d’écritures (1968-2018). In January 2019, Wise was invited to speak at Green College, UBC in Vancouver Canada, where he gave a talk on the crisis in Mali, entitled “The Jihad of Iyad Ag Ghali”. He gave another talk at Université Hassan II in Casablanca, Morocco on “American Studies in the Arab University: 9/11 to Azawad”. In Paris, Wise also gave a teleconference on Yambo Ouologuem for UBIZNEWS, “Yambo l’Utime Témoignage: Téléconférence” on February 28, 2019.
Laura Laffrado
Laura Laffrado and her work on Pacific Northwest author Ella Rhoads Higginson were featured in the Seattle Sunday Times Magazine cover story “Poetic Justice.” Her project for a bronze bust honoring Higginson was completed in November with installation of the bust in the Wilson Library foyer and the Ella Higginson Celebration (watch the event). Her book Selected Writings of Ella Higginson: Inventing Pacific Northwest Literature received the 2018 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Edition Award ( watch her acceptance speech in Denver). Her essay, “The Value of Digitized Newspaper Collections in Researching Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century U.S. Women’s Writing: Two Newly Recovered Poems by Ella Rhoads Higginson,” appeared in the Readex Report and her Op-Ed “The New West” appeared in The Seattle Times.
BA, 2000: Heather June Gibbons
Heather June Gibbons (BA, 2000) published, though The University of Utah Press, the poetry book Her Mouth as Souvenir which was selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize.
BA, 1978: Robert Stothart
Robert Stothart (BA, 1978) won the 2018 Conger Beasley, Jr. Award in Nonfiction from the journal New Letters for his essay “Cataract Surgery.”