In the spring of 2019, Jane Wong was honored by receiving the Womxn of Color Empowerment Award at WWU. Her first solo art exhibition, “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly,” ran from June-September 2019 at the Frye Art Museum, and was featured on Hyperallergic. Also during the summer, she was an artist-in-residence via the Jentel Foundation, SAFTA, and Sarabande Books. Recent poems and essays have appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit, Apogee, The Common, Shenandoah, POETRY, Orion, The Yale Review, and others. Her second book, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James is forthcoming next year. And she’s busy working on a third book of poems and a collection of essays. This past fall, she was thrilled to have a poem alongside a former WWU student of hers, Tessie Monique (Class of 2018), in The Lantern Review.
Brenda Miller
Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola revised their highly popular textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction for a 3rd edition, published by McGraw-Hill in August 2019. In the past year, Brenda’s essays and poems appeared in such venues as Fusion, Bellevue Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, and The Writer’s Chronicle. Her book of collaborative essays, written with MA Alum Julie Marie Wade, called Telephone: Essays in Two Voices, received the Cleveland Poetry Center Award for an Essay Collection, chosen by Hanif Abdurraqib, in 2019, and it will be published by Cleveland State University Press in 2021. She also has forthcoming a collection of her “writing on writing,” called A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, with University of Michigan Press in 2021. Her website is www.brendamillerwriter.com
Kami Westhoff
Kami Westhoff’s poetry and fiction appeared or is forthcoming in XRAY Magazine, SWIMM, Whale Road Review, Ghost Parachute, and Carve’s Ways of Looking Anthology. Her collection of short stories, The Criteria, was accepted by Unsolicited Press.
Suzanne Paola
Suzanne Paola has had three books accepted for publication this year: one, The Devil’s Castle (nonfiction), is in the writing stage and appearing in 2022 from Counterpoint Press. Two are finished and in the publication process— Entangled Objects: A Novel in Quantum Parts (Slant Books, fiction) and The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here (OSU 21st Century Essay series, nonfiction)— both appearing in 2021. She has published poetry in the South Carolina Review and essays in Signal Mountain Review, the UK Independent, and the New York Times. Additionally, she has published the critical article “Speculative Nonfiction” in the AWP Chronicle and contributed a chapter, “The Truth in Schreber’s Delusions,” to the scholarly work The Futures of Neurodiversity, forthcoming from Modern Language Association Books.
Donna Qualley
Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien (English Literature major and PWLR minor, WWU Fall 2020) co-wrote a chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time” for an edited collection entitled Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies, edited by Peter Moe and Stacey Waite and to be published by Parlor Press in 2021. The collection focuses for the important role of student writing in composition studies research and the impact it has had on the development of the field.