MFA Alum Books Galore!

Check it: new short story collection by NMSU MFA grad Andrew Scott is out for us all to enjoy. Kudos to Andrew! Engine Books is his wife Victoria Barrett's press (she's also an alum), and Andrew runs an online book club called Andrew's Book Club.

In Naked Summer, Andrew Scott brilliantly conjures up my home state of Indiana, that in-between, mixed-up blend of farmland, suburbia, isolated towns and would-be cities stuck in the flyover, but he accomplishes much more than this. His stunning collection of stories also deftly captures those in-between states that everyone finds themselves in at some point—those times of limbo when we’re between jobs or relationships, or, most memorably, that last “naked summer” when childhood lingers and adulthood has not yet arrived. This is a heart-wrenching collection, at once hilarious and wise. I couldn’t put it down.

—Elizabeth Stuckey-French, author of The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady and Mermaids on the Moon

Andrew Scott’s stories are streamlined, intense, and unsettling. His characters don’t quite know themselves, but the author knows them well. They teeter in the margins of safety, in a way that many Americans have been pushed off the path to the dream. I recommend these stories highly.

—Alice Elliott Dark, author of In the Gloaming and Think of England

GRAD BOOK ALERT!

YES! Joey Nicoletti is making good. He is the author of the poetry collections Borrowed Dust (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Cannoli Gangster, which was selected as a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Poetry Prize by Denise Duhamel (Turning Point Books, September 2012). Feel free to contact him and read some of his other work at www.joeynicoletti.com.

"In his first full-length collection, Cannoli Gangster, Joey Nicoletti deftly weaves cultural, familial, and personal memory into poems that are funny, profound, and moving at once. Exploring the truth and the strangeness of being Italian, American, and Italian-American, he reflects the subtle nuances of experiencing America’s cultural melting pot and the challenges of assimilation at a depth only poetry can reach. These are wry, wise, and deeply humane poems filled with images that are memorable and undeniably true."

—Dan Albergotti, author of The Boatloads, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize

MFA BOOK ALERT!

NMSU MFA graduate Krystal Languell is now available in print! Call the Catastrophists can be purchased from Blazevox or any of your favorite retailers. (Photo credit: Pieter van Hattem--from a recent article in Poets and Writers Magazine where she discusses our MFA.)

When we discuss Krystal, it's along these lines...

"Krystal Languell traverses memory and desire with a tough-minded concern for language’s (in)ability to mean. Place and language collide, collude, and collapse everywhere, producing subversions of the order/system of all things: catastrophe pervades. Call the Catastrophists interrogates—colloquially, effortlessly—the damage done to us by language. There is perhaps no greater challenge for the poet, and perhaps no better poet to engage it than Languell." —Carmen Giménez Smith

José de Piérola Reading (with Megan Wong, MFA Candidate), Friday October 21

18th Annual Hunger Benefit A Success

Thanks to all who participated in this year's Hunger Benefit. All proceeds from the event benefited Casa de Peregrinos, a local emergency food program. According to Casa de Peregrinos Executive Director Lorenzo Alba, the program fed near ten thousand families in 2009 and distributes between 15 and 21 tons of food a week. The benefit has raised close to $65,000 for the charity over the years. This year's event featured poet Juliana Spahr. Other featured readings included editor and local poet Sheila Black, author Jim Ferris and Lisa Gill. Below are pictures from the event.

From left to right: Kara Dorris, Bobby Byrd, Sheila Black, and Jennifer Bartlett

Jim Ferris at podium

Juliana Spahr

Lily Hoang and Joshua Bowen Reading

New creative writing fiction faculty member, Lily Hoang, recently read with MFA candidate Joshua Bowen. 

New Semester Kicks Off with Reading

It's an exciting new year of readings, and what better way to kick off the year than with a reading by Lee K. Abbott? 

A New Mexico State University alum from 1973, Lee K. Abbott is a nationally acclaimed writer whose work often engages with the lives of contemporary New Mexicans. He is the author of six books, including the recent All Things, All at Once: New and Selected Stories (2006). 

Abbott's reading was preceded by a spectacular reading by poetry MFA candidate Floydd Eliott.