Novels, Stories, and Poetry Collections
Exhibition Text, D. Frederick Thomas (MFA 2014)
Vagabond Press, October 2024
From the press:
Invited by a formerly estranged friend to write about her enigmatic new artwork for an upcoming show, an unnamed narrator makes the journey from Brisbane to Baltimore hoping to make sense of things both past and present. Following the strange logic of a Möbius strip, Thomas’s debut grapples with the question of how to move through the world when one’s sense of self is suddenly and fundamentally fractured. Recalling the early work of poet-novelist Paul Auster, and coupled with rare vulnerability, humour and great charm, Exhibition Text is a deeply layered investigation into the nature of self, reality, art and perception. Thomas magically balances contemporary anxiety and a deep existential curiosity to conjure moments of radiant insight and a profound, very human beauty in a debut that will quickly establish Thomas as a unique and essential voice among the emerging generation of Australian writers of experimental fiction.”
The Mourner's Bestiary, Eiren Caffall (BA 1994)
Row House Publishing, October 2024
Caffall is the inheritor of a family legacy of two hundred years of genetic kidney disease and the mother of a child who may inherit that legacy. A literary memoir on loss, chronic illness, and generational healing, Caffall’s The Mourner’s Bestiary is also a meditation on grief and survival told through the stories of animals in two collapsing marine ecosystems—the Gulf of Maine and the Long Island Sound—and the lives of a family facing a life-threatening illness on their shores.
Caffall was the recipient of a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Award in 2023 for The Mourner's Bestiary. Here's what the jury wrote:
Beguiling, idiosyncratic: Eiren Caffall makes an original contribution to the growing genre of memoirs that explore illness and healing. The Mourner’s Bestiary draws a poetic parallel between the body’s experience of chronic disease and the marine ecosystems Caffall knows well—an unexpected juxtaposition that gives new dimension to climate hazards we face and opportunities to address them. Caffall writes with plangent intensity about our responsibility toward the planet, and her eye for the wonder and beauty of ocean life pierces the illusion of disconnected existence. Water becomes an element that draws us together.
And check out these blurbs!
"Caffall brilliantly parallels her family’s suffering with large-scale ecological upheaval, maintaining a flicker of hope for the future in both cases. This deserves a wide readership." Publisher's Weekly Starred Review
"Eiren Caffall has produced some of the most powerful writing on the ecological crisis I have read anywhere. Caffall is a gifted writer, and this book is strong medicine." Naomi Klein, author, social activist, and filmmaker
All the Water in the World, Eiren Caffall (BA 1994)
But wait...there's more! All the Water in the World is told in the voice of a girl gifted with a deep feeling for water. In the years after the glaciers melt, Nonie, her older sister and her parents and their researcher friends have stayed behind in an almost deserted New York City, creating a settlement on the roof of the American Museum of Natural History. The rule: Take from the exhibits only in dire need. They hunt and grow their food in Central Park as they work to save the collections of human history and science. When a superstorm breaches the city’s flood walls, Nonie and her family must escape north on the Hudson. They carry with them a book that holds their records of the lost collections. Racing on the swollen river towards what may be safety, they encounter communities that have adapted in very different and sometimes frightening ways to the new reality. But they are determined to find a way to make a new world that honors all they've saved.
Inspired by the stories of the curators in Iraq and Leningrad who worked to protect their collections from war, All the Water in the World is both a meditation on what we save from collapse and an adventure story—with danger, storms, and a fight for survival. In the spirit of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Parable of the Sower, this wild journey offers the hope that what matters most – love and work, community and knowledge – will survive.
If Nothing, Matthew Nienow (MFA 2010)
Alice James Books, January 2025
If Nothing is a poetry collection that reckons honestly with the grip of addiction, the expectations of masculinity, and the tug of family. When mid-life collides with the precariousness of alcoholism, the vulnerability of opening oneself to a second coming-of-age becomes an ecstatic cry in poems that confront pain and the need for forgiveness. An unvarnished and direct accounting of the journey to sobriety, of struggles with mental health, and with the challenges of longing and loss, If Nothing traverses the sting of shame, the earnestness of joy, and the desire for absolution.
This is what Kaveh Akbar, who was honored by the English Department at our 7th Annual Lee Scheingold Lecture in Poetry and Poetics in 2024, had to say about If Nothing:
Matthew Nienow shows us in If Nothing that he is a poet of birth, of making and making anew. He writes, 'All the second chances, what did they teach me, if not to dream more wildly toward a kingdom in which the king was not so cruel?' and then he shows us the stutter step restarting of love after malice, tenderness after neglect. This is powerful medicine, salve for earnest souls in an era of ethical infantilization. There is grace here, real grace made wise by having known real grief; If Nothing is a lasting book.
Girlhood x A Haunting, Jessica Rae Bergamino (MFA 2014)
Driftwood Press, February 2025
In Bergamino's Girlhood x A Haunting, the reader, in a slipping Nancy Drew mask, follows clues with a magnifying glass through an explosive, visual, lyric, and devastatingly unique landscape to find the truth about girlhood, trauma, and Nancy Drew as a cultural icon.
Hear what others have to say:
Jessica Rae Bergamino’s Girlhood x A Haunting summons the girl sleuth, Nancy Drew. Bergamino's gorgeous gurlesque poems take the reader on a tour of the horrors of high school ('Her ghosts push through her school’s green halls, laughing their stuffy laugh'), child abuse ('When my father corners his daughter in detail he warns her, at least, tells her, Nancy, I’m going to talk to you like a grown-up now, treat you like one, break the glass of my anger and let it evergreen in you, all myrtle and clove'), and trauma ('where your memory splits from sight'). True crime is popular because viewing violation provides the illusion of control in a culture where so many are unsafe. Bergamino’s book channels one of the OG feminist icons of the genre and empowers readers to navigate, perhaps even survive, the true crimes of childhood. I love this book. — Claudia Cortese, author of Wasp Queen
Show Me Where the Hurt Is, Hayden Casey (BA 2017, English minor)
Split Lip Press, April 2025
Another debut! Show Me Where the Hurt Is is a collection of stories about love and grief, anchored in brokenness—broken people, broken relationships, broken systems—and the obsessions and insecurities that prevent us from revealing ourselves to one another. The characters in Casey’s collection are on quests for betterment, for pleasure, for distraction—and ultimately, for transformation.
Across thirteen stories that brush up against the strange and surreal, Show Me Where the Hurt Is tenderly exposes old wounds that have been carefully concealed so that we might understand the hurt in one another.
Mothersalt, Mia Ayumi Malhotra (MFA 2011)
Alice James Books, May 2025
Drawing from the sticky, milk-drenched reality of childbirth and pregnancy, Mothersalt explores the intimacies and bewilderment of early motherhood, illuminating the myriad ways in which the self, reconstituted through birth, can emerge into powerful new forms of existence.
With haunting precision, Mothersalt explores the ways in which the lyric self is split apart and stitched back together through the experience of pregnancy and early motherhood. Interspersed with tender addresses to a child in utero, Mothersalt recounts the disorientation of giving birth in America, where birthing people are not always recognized as agents of their own story. Through the struggles of a self fighting to reclaim the experience of childbirth, Mothersalt asserts a new narrative of what is possible, not only in the birthing room, but in all forms of human relation.
At its heart, this is a book about resilience, healing, and joy, and the sustaining life that emerges from practices of embodied care. Through fragmentary forms inspired by Sei Shōnagon’s pillow book and the miscellany prose diaries of medieval Japan, Mothersalt brings loving attention to the labor involved in bearing and caring for young children, transforming the dimensions of the everyday to reveal its ephemeral beauty.
Not All Dead Together, Lynn Stansbury (MFA 2015)
Chin Music Press, May 2025
Not All Dead Together traces the intertwined lives and friendship of two families, one Guatemalan and one American, across 60 years of war and betrayal. It is a sweeping saga that chronicles the lives of family members brought together by blood and by choice over decades of violent sociopolitical conflict and exploitative foreign relations between the two countries.
Through lyrical, richly detailed narratives told from multiple perspectives over a period of 65 years, we meet an ensemble cast of characters at critical points in their lives. Miguel, a physician at a neighborhood clinic in Guatemala, must immediately treat a boy who shot his own hand. Years earlier, his sister, Aleta, strives to improve the lives of her indigenous neighbors despite relentless systemic injustices and the constant threat of state-sponsored terror. A rudderless young Peace Corps volunteer named Gray finds the familial connection she craves in caring and perceptive Aleta, brilliant Miguel, their guileful brother, Carlos, and their kindhearted mother, Doña Paz. As the characters' paths intertwine, all question the direction of their lives in a world where the political and personal are inextricable and their choices can have life-or-death consequences.
At once fierce and tender, Not All Dead Together wrestles with complex questions on the meaning of heroism, resilience, and found family.
Lynn is also an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the UW School of Medicine.
Busting the Myth of the Communication Metaphor, Sarah Read (PhD, 2011)
SUNY Press, July 2025
Busting the Myth of the Communication Metaphor is a transdisciplinary approach to making visible and explaining the multiple origins of why our most basic beliefs about what makes scientific and technical writing successful are wrong, ineffective, and harmful. These tacitly held beliefs and practices, collectively called the Communication Metaphor, stand in as symbolic for a messier, more reality-based understanding of how writing and communication works. By starting from conventional statements made by scientists, technical professionals, and standard textbooks that "successful technical writing is short and to the point, with the facts only, no opinions," the book traces the histories and structures of the multiple elements of the Communication Metaphor. The text synthesizes survey results, multiple strands of scholarship, personal experience, and original illustrations into a powerful argument for imagining a more just approach to scientific and technical writing.
Sarah is Associate Professor of English and Director of Professional and Technical Writing at Portland State University.
Detonator, Peter Mountford (MFA 2006)
Four Way Books, September 2025
Peter writes that his story collection Detonator will be releasing later this year. He cites his time at UW as formative:
Many of the collection’s stories, which take place around the world, were influenced by my education at UW. Charles Johnson nominated one of the stories "Horizon" for inclusion in Best New American Voices 2006, and as luck would have it that story ended up being in that anthology (my first ever story acceptance). David Shields also was a major influence on many of these stories.
The characters in Detonator are struggling to do better, to save their souls. These stories are deeply preoccupied with the consequences of human decisions— these often funny and sometimes painful stories highlight flawed but fascinating characters making flawed choices in the hopes of achieving grace, or at least growth. The short stories address problematic contemporary themes around power, the post-colonial era, and the world’s complex financial system.
And check out these blurbs!
“Whatever sort of surprise you're after—funny, devastating, sexy, shocking, savage, tender, illuminating—Detonator will supply it..." -Karen Russell, MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Finalist, author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove
“The stories in Detonator are hilarious, even when they are miserable.” -Mary Gaitskill, author of Bad Behavior, Veronica, and The Mare
Wrecks, Erin L. McCoy (MFA 2017)
Noemi Press, October 2025
Wrecks was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award. From her website:
Wrecks is a collection of poems inspired by the great auk, a flightless seabird driven to extinction in the mid-1800s. The book investigates how the human–nonhuman binary and the dehumanization it enables makes space for violence—against animals and the environment, but also against other humans. It engages my own experience of dehumanization as an atheist growing up in the conservative South; it also interrogates my complicity in systems of structural racism, and my inheritance as the descendant of colonizers.
Underlake, Erin L. McCoy (MFA 2017)
Doubleday, 2026
Your eyes aren’t deceiving you: Erin has a second book forthcoming! Underlake, her debut novel, follows two women who dive deep into the waters of a mysterious lake under which a town of people are rumored to live, connected by an intricate system of tubes and chimneys. Along the way, they discover communities that have lived in isolation for decades and witnessing the extremes of delusion to which institutional religion, white flight, and nostalgia have driven them. These women explore what is possible when women reach through time, space, and memory to relate to one another.
Alumni Awards
Washington State Poet Laureate, Derek Sheffield (BA, MFA)
From the Washington State Arts Commission:
Celebrated poet and professor Derek Sheffield will soon become Washington’s eighth State Poet Laureate. Sheffield lives in the Wenatchee Valley and serves as a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College. He has published several poetry collections and edits poetry for Terrian.org, and has also received fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, Artist Trust, the Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, and the Spring Creek Foundation for his poetry. He will take over the role from current Laureate Arianne True.
Sheffield is particularly passionate about the mental health crisis affecting young people. “As laureate, I want to engage more of our teenagers with poetry. Whether we are writing them or reading them, poems make for good medicine,” he wrote. “Poetry helps us slow down and dwell more consciously in place and time. When we give our attention to poetry, we tend to choose sky time over screen time. Like no other pursuit I know of, poetry honors the individual life as it offers glimpses of the scintillant interiority living inside each of us.”
Making English Official: Writing and Resisting Local Language Policies, Katherine S. Flowers (BA 2010)
Cambridge University Press, 2024
Winner of the 2025 CCCC Research Impact Award
In their writeup of Katherine's book, The CCCC Research Impact Award Selection Committee noted:
Flowers’ comprehensive, compelling research illuminates in rich detail how local communities write, revise, circulate, and resist English-only language policies. The committee was impressed by the study’s scope: its mixed methods narrate the history of English-only policies and make visible the people who draft, promote, and challenge them. Flowers’ critique of the English-only policy is directly related to CCCC's mission statement of supporting linguistic diversity and translingualism to promote equity in writing curriculum. Flowers’ argument is timely and convincing, an important disciplinary contribution for both those who study language policy and those called to create and challenge these policies.
Congrats to our amazing alumni!