Carol Guess’s short story collection Girl Zoo was nominated for the 2019 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Co-written with Aimee Parkison, Girl Zoo depicts a dystopian landscape where girls and women exist only in confinement and under surveillance. Currently collaborating with Rochelle Hurt on a persona poetry manuscript, she has new work forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Juked, Superstition Review, and Western Humanities Review. Her collaboration with Suzanne Paola, speculative fiction titled “The Desk,” will appear in Tupelo Quarterly. Guess is a member of Fiction Collective Two and will be the judge of the 2020 Utah Original Writing Competition for Short Fiction.
BA, 2019: Anita Levin
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.
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.
Kathryn Trueblood
Kathryn Trueblood’s new novel, Take Daily As Needed, treats parenting while chronically ill with the desperado humor the subject deserves (forthcoming September 2019 from the University of New Mexico Press). She will be offering a workshop to celebrate the Whatcom Library System’s Anniversary: 75 Years of Sharing Stories called “Telling Tough Stories: Writing Illness,” in the fall of 2019. This year, Trueblood co-taught a Red Badge Project weekend workshop in Walla Walla with Shawn Wong in October 2018, and a month-long workshop at The Bellingham Veterans Center in April 2019. She was invited to attend a workshop sponsored by the Great Books Foundation “Help Veterans Help Each Other,” in Chicago, October 26-27, 2018, fully funded. From October to May, she then co-moderated a book club, “War Through the Eyes of Women” at The Bellingham Vet Center, and she again served as writing coach and faculty advisor for “Stories Deployed: the Veteran Chronicles,” now in its sixth year.
Kelly Magee
Kelly Magee’s story “Nobody Understands You Like You” was selected by Antonya Nelson to be included in New Stories from the Midwest 2018, her story (with Carol Guess), “With Killer Bees” was included in an anthology of collaborative writing, They Said, and her story (with Kami Westhoff) “The Unbearable Here” was published in Contrary. She developed a new course in “Queer Memoir” and taught a Graduate Fiction Workshop around the idea of “influence”—what things contemporary writers are influenced by, and how they can best exert their own influence. She also spoke on a panel on “The Speculative and Fantastic in LGBTQ+ Writing” and organized “Taste of Western,” a reading of WWU faculty at this year’s AWP conference in Portland.