Derek Sheffield (BA ’90, MFA ’99) wanted to let you know about the book he recently published with C Marie Fuhrman and Elizabeth Bradfield (BA ‘98): Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Cascadia Field Guide features select UW English Alums and faculty, including Colleen J. McElroy, Linda Bierds, David Wagoner, and Frances McCue.
Says Derek:
This book was five years in the making, and it's been so gratifying to see how it's becoming something of a cultural phenomenon. Since its release at Seattle's Town Hall (a sold-out event that included UW Alum Attorney General Bob Ferguson in the audience), Cascadia Field Guide has been on the Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association's Bestseller List.
Derek Sheffield is a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College, where he serves as co-chair of the Sustainability Committee and teaches Northwest Nature Writing, a learning community that blends the study of field ecology with writing. He has won the WVC Excellence in Teaching Award a record five times and has twice served as the commencement speaker by request of the students. Sheffield is also Poetry Editor at Terrain.org.
Brian Christian (MFA '08) sends us this missive from England:
Greetings from Oxford and I hope all is well in Seattle. I wanted to share some happy news: Today The New York Times listed my most recent book of nonfiction, The Alignment Problem, as one of the "5 Best Books About Artificial Intelligence." In fact, they write: "If you’re going to read one book on artificial intelligence, this is the one."
Showered with impressive reviews from heavy-weight sources, The Alignment Problem takes examines the problems inherent in current AI models and proposes alternative directions to head off problems before human hands are completely off the steering wheel. It’s not just a good read, but of critical importance.
Christian’s previous book, The Most Human Human, on Turing tests and the implications of computers becoming in ways indistinguishable from people, landed him an interview with John Stewart on The Daily Show. He writes and lectures from a faculty post at Oxford University. Thanks Brian for pointing us to your latest work.
Bainbridge Island’s Erin Malone (MFA ’96) has published a second full-length poetry collection, Site of Disappearance. In it, “spare and resonant lyrics confront the silence that followed Malone’s 11-year-old brother’s death. Decades later, as her own son approaches this age, she finds herself returning to her childhood landscape, remembering for the first time in years the abductions and murders of two boys that shook her small town that same season. Through archival research, and with tenderness and precision, she steps carefully through the wreckage left by tragedy, in which brother/ boy/ son blur and revolve, and ‘time stands still because it has a body.’ Site of Disappearance is an intimate reckoning with personal and collective grief guided by an acute awareness of language’s power to reveal and transform.”
Congratulations Erin!
Erin Marie Lynch (BA ’19) has published a poetry collection from Graywolf Press. Removal Acts draws its title from the 1863 Federal Act that banished the Dakota people from their homelands. Reckoning with the present-day repercussions of historical violence through an array of brief lyrics, visual forms, chronologies, and sequences, these virtuosic poems trace a path through the labyrinth of distances and absences haunting the American colonial experiment.
Erin Marie Lynch's writing appears in POETRY, New England Review, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Wurlitzer Foundation.
Rachel Edelman (MFA ‘16) celebrated the release of her poetry collection, Dear Memphis, with a launch party on Saturday, January 27th at The Royal Room. Offering a direct address to the city where the poet grew up, this collection explores the displacement and belonging of a Jewish family in Memphis, Tennessee, alongside their histories of community and environment. Says the publisher: “The simultaneous richness and spareness of Edelman’s poems sing with their attention to the particular body and what it cannot carry, what it cannot put down. Through letters, visual art, city documents, and dialogue, Dear Memphis excavates ancestry, inheritance, and the ecological possibility of imagining a future.”
Edelman’s poetry has been published far and wide. She teaches Language Arts in the Seattle Public Schools, where “embodiment and care root her personal, poetic, and pedagogical practice.” Congratulations Rachel, and thank you for your work in the public schools!
Alice Ranjan (BA ’20, Microbiology and English) is currently a clinical research coordinator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center. She just published a poem in Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities. The poem ruminates on the death of a young child, taken by cancer, focusing on the sadness of missed joys, lightly buffered by the absence of life’s inevitable heartaches. Ms. Ranjan has previously published short fiction for the MedStar Health Institute for Quality and Safety, a healthcare organization in the Maryland/DC area. Touching poem Alice, thank you.
Sarah Faulkner (PhD ‘20) is now Program Manager at Humanities Washington (maybe you recall English Matters interview with Sarah on the occasion of her self-produced Jane Austen conference Janefest). Sarah reports that one of her former students, Ariana Sutherland (BA ’23) recently wrote an interview/article for Humanities Washington called "Political Shaming Doesn't Work." In the article, Ariana interviews WSU Professor and member of the statewide Speakers Bureau political scientist Carolyn Long. The article tracks the history of—and trouble with—shaming people for their beliefs. It’s exquisitely well written, interesting, important, and could not be more worth your time.
Congratulations on your fantastic article Ariana, and thanks so much Sarah for sharing (and congratulations on the Humanities Washington post)!
Last year Jessica E. Johnson (BA ‘01, MFA ‘04) published a full length poetry collection, Metabolics. Reviewer Donna Vorreyer: “the domestic is both glorified and made strange in Jessica E. Johnson’s Metabolics. This hybrid book-length poem of twelve connected pieces is attuned to language and image in a way that provides a unique portrait of family and environment (specifically the Pacific Northwest) as the speaker interrogates the self and what it means to live in a world that prizes devices over forests.” Compelling!
And now Johnson’s memoir Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Making Home is coming out in a couple of weeks. As with previous books, critical reception has been enthusiastic.
Professor Johnson is Chair of Creative Writing at Portland Community College, and a seasoned reader, teacher, and arts organizer. She writes book-length poems and book-length essays; genre-switching and hybrid works; and cultivates communities around reading and writing. You can (or really, should) catch the Seattle launch of Mettlework on July 2, 2024 at Elliott Bay Books. Congratulations Jessica!
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