Alumni Updates

Chelsea Jennings (MFA 2008; Ph.D. 2014) has won the 2017 Juniper Prize for Poetry, bringing with it the publication of her first book of poems, Transmission Loss, from the University of Massachusetts Press, due out in early 2018.   Jennings is the recipient of a “Discovery”/Boston Review award and annual prizes from december, the Cincinnati Review, and Black Warrior Review. Her poetry has also appeared in such places as Sugar House Review, Madison Review, Mississippi Review, Sycamore Review, Poet Lore, and Best New Poets, and her critical writing about poetry can be found in Contemporary Literature and the Journal of Modern Literature. She currently teaches high school English in Seattle.

Rahul K. Gairola, (Ph.D. 2010), is an advanced Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the Indian Institute of Technology in Roorkee, India.  He’s just published Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and co-edited Revisiting India's Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, & Politics (Lexington, 2016).  He is an Article Editor for Postcolonial Text.  Dr. Gairola is currently working on two new book projects: one which critically tracks shifting meanings of "home" in digital identities and cultures of 21st-century South Asia, and another examining home economics, gender, and migration from rural Garhwal to the urban centers of northern India.

Lucas Peters (BA 2003) published the guidebook Moon Morocco in January 2017 with Avalon Publishing.  Peters lived in Morocco for six years, teaching at Al Akhawayn University. He is now an adjunct at the Sorbonne in Paris, living on the Left Bank with his wife and son.

Heather Arvidson (Ph.D. 2014) won the 2017 Andrew J. Kappel Prize in Literary Criticism for her 2017 article "Numb Modernism: Sentiment and the Intellectual Left in Tess Slesinger’s The Unpossessed" in the journal Twentieth-Century Literature.  A journal of literary criticism, TCL annually selects the year’s submitted work judged “to make the most impressive contribution to the study of 20th century literature.”

Mia Malhotra (MFA 2011) is the winner of the Alice James Award from Alice James Press for her manuscript, When I See You Again, It Will Be with a Different Face. Malhotra will receive a $2,000 prize, and her collection of poems will be published in ­­­April 2019.  She will also receive an honorarium to give a reading at the University of Maine at Farmington.  When I See You Again, It Will Be with a Different Face was also selected as a finalist for three more awards:  Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, and the Kundiman Poetry Prize.

Currently residing in the Bay Area with her husband and daughters, Malhotra, a Kundiman Poetry Fellow and a founding editor of Lantern Review, has been published widely, including in Pacific Literary Review, Greensboro Review, Drunken Boat, Best New Poets, and the Stanford Journal of Asian American Studies.  Malhotra's 2011 Creative Writing MFA thesis, supervised by faculty member Pimone Triplett, is titled In The Quiet After.

 

 Radha Marcum (MFA ’00, Bierds chair, McHugh) published Bloodline, a collection of her poetry.  A poet with keen interest in both the landscape of the physical world and of the mind, Ms. Marcum lives in Colorado where she’s worked as a journalist and editor.  She has taught literature and creative writing in Seattle, Boulder, and Rome, Italy. Poems have appeared in, among others, FIELD, West Branch, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Chelsea, The Bellingham Review, Poetry Northwest, and Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art.