Anita Levin (BA, 2019) currently works at Publishers Group West in Berkeley California. She has also published numerous essays and stories in a handful of journals, including The Lifted Brow, Hypertext, Alternating Current, The Lidenwood Review, Barnhouse, and others.
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.
Mary Janell Metzger
Mary Janell Metzger presented “Teaching the Tragedy of White Supremacy in Shakespeare’s Othello” at the British Shakespeare Association meeting in Belfast. Her essay “Shakespearean Tragedy, Ethics, and Social Justice” is forthcoming in Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare (Birmingham UP). She was invited to present a paper on “Teaching Shakespeare for Social Change In, and Beyond, The College Classroom” as part of a 2020 plenary panel at the Shakespeare Association of America on Pedagogy and Social Justice. In spring term, she and her Senior Seminar participated in a national project called “The Qualities of Mercy” in which college Shakespeare students across the country each produce a video of one scene in The Merchant of Venice, after studying the play in light of contemporary, and local, issues of immigration and structural inequality. The linked videos will be uploaded in sequence for viewing on Youtube
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller, with her colleague Suzanne Paola, has been hard at work on the updates for the Third Edition of Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, scheduled for release this summer. Her poetry and essays have appeared in such venues as Tupelo Quarterly, Jet Fuel Review (with alum Julie Marie Wade), and Psaltery & Lyre (edited by alum Dayna Patterson). Brenda’s essay “The Shape of Emptiness,” originally published in Brevity, received recognition as a “Notable Essay of 2018” in Best American Essays. Her article “The Fine Art of Containment in Creative Nonfiction” appeared in the March issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. In her teaching, she developed a new course focused solely on “Hermit Crab Essays” for ENG 458: Topics in Nonfiction Writing, and a graduate course (ENG 598) exploring the assumptions and practices of creative writing pedagogy.
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.
Christopher Loar
Chris Loar’s unhealthy obsession with Daniel Defoe continues. His essay on Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year will appear in Eighteenth-Century Fiction this fall, and he is currently working on a book chapter about Defoe’s responses to scientific developments in the early eighteenth century. He’s also still co-editing the online journal Digital Defoe (digitaldefoe.org). And this summer he’ll travel to York in the UK to present some of his research on Defoe and deism. His students this year have mostly been spared from this obsession, though; instead, his teaching has focused on the sibling novelists Henry and Sarah Fielding; on ecological writing in the past, present, and future tenses; and on literary animals.
Jane Wong
Jane Wong’s second book of poems, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021. Recently, her essays and poems have appeared in places such as POETRY, Orion, New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, The Georgia Review, and others. She has a forthcoming piece in The Best American Non-required Reading 2019 anthology. This summer, she will be busy writing at three residencies, including: Jentel, SAFTA Farms, and Blackacre as Sarabande’s Writer-in-Residence. Check out her solo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle (running from June 1st-September 1st) entitled “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly.
MA, 1980: Paul Lindholdt
Paul Lindholdt (MA, 1980) has published essays in Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and Southern Review. Other essays are forthcoming in Seneca Review and Tampa Review.
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.”