Photos from the Nelson/Boswell Reading Series

Check out some pictures from the 2010-2011 La Sociedad para las Artes Nelson/Boswell Reading Series! These pictures range from October 2010 to April 2011. All photos by Josh Bowen.

MFA student poet Elizabeth Brasher

poet Cynthia Hogue

MFA fiction writer Daniel Cameron

novelist Daniel Black

MFA fiction writer Tracy Bowling

poet (and NMSU MFA alum) Dorine Jennette

Writer Sallie Bingham

poet and NMSU alum TIm Staley

poet Patty Seyburn

MFA fiction writer Erin Reardon

poet Rosa Alcala

MFA fiction writer Laura Walker

MFA poet Carrie Murphy

poet Jacqueline Osherow

MFA poet Peter Brooks

poet Rachel Levitsky

MFA fiction writer Mike Meginnis

NMSU visiting professor, fiction writer and NMSU alum Evan Lavender-Smith

Recent Publications: Students and Faculty

Poet and professor Richard Greenfield has some new poems up at Common-Place.

Carmen Gimenez Smith, in a visual collaboration with artist and fellow NMSU faculty member Peter Fine, has three poems at Listenlight.

MFA student Melanie Sweeney Bowen has a piece in the January issue of the Foundling Review.

3rd year poet Robert Alan Wendeborn has four poems in the latest issue of Kill Author.

Adam Crittenden has a very short story in Up The Staircase, and two poems in the January issue of Diverse Voices Quarterly.  His poem "A Less Peaceful Meditation," also appears in The Meadowland Review.

Quite a few NMSU students, alumni and faculty appear in the inaugural issue of Lingerpost, including Adam Crittenden, John Chavez, Austin Tremblay, Natalie Day, Elizabeth Brasher, and former visiting writer Sheila Black.

3rd Year Student Profile: Carrie Murphy

Note: This is the last in a series profiling students in their last year of the MFA program at New Mexico State. To see the other students profiled, click on the 3rd year students label at the bottom of this post.  

Carrie Murphy is finishing her last year as an MFA student in Poetry at New Mexico State University, where she works as the La Sociedad Para Las Artes Reading Coordinator and and as a graduate assistant. During her first year in Las Cruces, she worked as an adjunct instructor at Dona Ana Community College.

Carrie grew up in Baltimore, Maryland and graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she majored in English and minored in Jewish Studies. Her other academic interests include feminism, Latin American literature, and girlhood studies. Her non-academic interests include cooking, live music, vintage clothing, becoming fluent in Spanish, photography, and hiking in the desert. She blogs with fellow NMSU poet Robert Alan Wendeborn at Master of Fine Eats, a blog about eating well in graduate school.

She's currently at work on her thesis, which explores gender performance within the landscape of girlhood. Carrie's poems have appeared in PANK, WTF PWM, Prick of the Spindle, Corium, and Keyhole 9. 

After graduation, Carrie would like to continue teaching writing, and is considering becoming a birth and postpartum doula. She will have her public reading on April 1st, 2011, with Jacqueline Osherow.

NMSU at AWP 11

NMSU will be well-represented at AWP this year, with both Puerto Del Sol and the NMSU MFA program exhibiting at the bookfair. The tables are right next to each other, so stop by and say hello, as well as pick up a copy of the latest Puerto and some information on the MFA at NMSU. Richard Greenfield's press, Apostrophe Books, will be sharing a table with Action Books. You can find Noemi Press at the Puerto table.

Be sure to attend Possess Nothing, a reading hosted by Apostrophe Books, Action Books, Black Ocean, Slope Editions, and Tarpaulin Sky Press on Saturday 2/5, 6:30 pm at the Wonderland Ballroom. 

Carmen Gimenez Smith will be participating in the following panels:

FRIDAY FEBRUARY 4TH AT 4:30PM

Omni Shoreham Empire Ballroom, West Lobby 
Poet/Editors on Inclusivity and Race. (Rich Villar, Dan Chiasson, Don
Share, Carmen Giménez Smith, Barbara Jane Reyes)
Poet/editors discuss inclusiveness (and lack thereof) of minority
voices in literary publications. Representing both mainstream and more
community-based projects, the panelists consider the challenges of
inclusiveness, and how successful (and unsuccessful) they have been.
They consider how, in an atmosphere of perceived mistrust,
constructive dialogue can be forged towards the goal of better
presenting the broad spectrum of American poetry.

Saturday, 4:30-5:45 p.m.

Wilson A, B, & C Room
Marriott Wardman Park, Mezzanine Level

S218. LaChiPo and the New Latino Poetics/Politics. (John-Michael Rivera, Rodrigo Toscano, Valerie Martinez, Roberto Tejada, Danielle Cadena Deulen, Carmen Giménez Smith) LaChiPo, an online forum for the Latino Diaspora, is the Latino’s 21st-century answer to “new” movements like flarf and conceptual poetics. Devoted to developing Latino letters, LaChiPo invites AWP attendees to resituate how they read, to relearn how identity is spoken, expanding their articulation of history, art and modernity. LaChiPo presents writers discussing Latino conceptions of internet community, identity and the avant-garde, reading individual and their collective poetry works.

Carmen will also be participating in the Floricanto reading, which is on Friday 2/4 at 6 pmat the True Reformer Building on U Street.

MFA students will also be busy; Heather Frankland will be volunteering for the conference. Carrie Murphy and Megan Wong will be at the NMSU MFA table, Mike Meginnis will be found at the Puerto Del Sol table and Robert Alan Wendeborn will be helping out at the Apostrophe table.

3rd Year Student Profile: Heather Dawn Frankland

Heather Dawn Frankland originally hails from Hoosier-land Indiana, which, contrary to public opinion, is not solely full of corn. She originally arrived to Las Cruces for a Masters of Public Health, but was so enchanted by a poetry elective class that she decided to pursue her MFA after receiving her MPH. Currently, she is completing her MFA in Poetry at New Mexico State University. She teaches courses in composition and creative writing in which she regularly inserts principles of community advocacy. Additionally, she has been active in community volunteering, program building, and grant writing.

Much of Heather’s work is inspired by her international experiences living abroad, namely her time serving as a Peace Corps Community Health Volunteer in Peru. Although she never really mastered how to drive a donkey as evidenced by the photo, she did learn a mountain of life experiences that expanded her paradigm. Her thesis-in-progress explores the concept of “othering” and being “othered.” She enjoys magical realism and modern interpretations of the fairy tale. 

After receiving her MFA, Heather plans to build programs that use creative approaches, such as writing, in order to address social and public health problems like violence. Although she hasn’t actively pursued publishing, she is focusing on doing so in the future  and becoming more widely published.

NMSU MFA Graduate's Literary Journal Celebrates First Print Issue

MFA Poetry '10 graduate Krystal Languell edits the journal Bone Bouquet, which is celebrating the release of its first print issue.  The NMSU English Dept helped fund the journal with a 2009-10 creative activities grant, and MFA student Elizabeth Brasher and fellow MFA Poetry '10 graduate Allison Layfield have also become involved with the journal. See below for information about the journal, and its inaugural launch reading in Brooklyn this month.

BONE BOUQUET FIRST PRINT ISSUE NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER 

Bone Bouquet is delighted to announce the availability of our first print issue--#2.1--in January 2011. As was our plan from the beginning, we're making the transition from web-only to a hybrid print and online publication.
The new issue is now available for pre-order (http://bonebouquet.org/2010/12/13/252/).

 This issue includes new work from: 

Arielle Greenberg, Jennifer Firestone
Tamiko Beyer, Dana Teen Lomax
Leigh Stein, Emily Skillings
Carolyn Guinzio, Dawn Pendergast
Jennifer H. Fortin, Kara Dorris
Becca Klaver, and Claire Hero.

The first two will remain viewable online, and select content from print issues will be available at our website as well. Issue 2.1 will begin shipping on 1/10/2011! 

BONE BOUQUET ISSUE 2.1 LAUNCH READING JANUARY 15, 2011
We'll be celebrating with a launch reading at Unnameable Books in Brooklyn on January 15, 2011 beginning at 6:00pm. We hope you'll join us if you can!
Readers include contributors Allison Layfield, Tamiko Beyer, Jennifer Firestone, Leigh Stein, Jennifer H. Fortin, and Kate Schapira!
Copies of the print issue will be available at the event, and wine will also be available. After party to take place across the street at Soda Bar.
Unnameable Books
600 Vanderbilt
Brooklyn, NY 11238
walkable from 2, 3 at Brooklyn Museum or 4, 5 at Franklin Ave or C train at Clinton-Washington.

MFA student's film featured on KRWG

Check out this short news segment about the production of the short film "Hatching Max," written by current MFA fiction student Anna Pattison and directed by Tony award-winning playwright Mark Medoff.

The script of "Hatching Max" was generated in Mark Medoff's Screenwriting class this past semester, and members of the class voted on which script should be made into a short film. The movie was filmed in Las Cruces in December and featured Tania Raymonde from ABC's Lost and J.D. Hinton in the two main roles. Other MFA students in the screenwriting class acted as extras, grips, and other assistants for the film, along with students in the Creative Media Institute program at NMSU.

2010 Frank Waters and Wilson/Somoza Awards

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Frank Waters and Wilson/Somoza awards, given annually to the best graduate work in creative writing as submitted by students. This year, the winners were:


Frank Waters Fiction Award in Fiction judged by Ellen Litman

1. “Another to the Multitude” by Chris Rosenbluth

2. “Conscience Round” by Melanie Sweeney Bowen

3. “Man of the Family” by Tracy Bowling


Keith Wilson / Joe Somoza / Ruth Scott Academy of American Poetry Prizes judged by Dorine Jennette

#1 –Robbie Wendeborn

#2—Carrie Murphy

#3—Adam Crittenden

Ruth Scott Academy of American Poets Prize—Elizabeth Brasher

Honorable Mention: Jeff Pickell
Honorable Mention: Nate Taylor
Honorable Mention: Robert Houghton

Congratulations to Jeff Frawley

Congratulations to Jeff Frawley MFA Fiction '09, a 2010-2011 Fulbright scholar in Creative Writing. He will be heading to Hungary in January to work on his novel.

Recent Student Publications

Adam Crittenden has a piece of flash fiction in the latest issue of the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Tracy Bowling, Mike Meginnis and Carrie Murphy all have work in the inaugural issue of Bluestem magazine (formerly Karamu).

Mike also has poems in the new issue of  >kill author.

3rd Year Student Profile: Tracy Bowling

Tracy Bowling

Tracy Bowling is completing her MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University, where she teaches courses in composition and creative writing and serves as a managing editor of Puerto del Sol. Tracy also works as an associate editor for Noemi Press. Tracy comes to Las Cruces from Indianapolis, Indiana, where she met her husband and fellow MFA candidate Mike Meginnis. Together they edit Uncanny Valley, a literature/entertainment blog and literary magazine focusing on innovative and cross-genre work. They are working on putting out the first print issue in 2011. 

Tracy spends her free time reading and playing video games, and has particular obsessions with The Simpsons, robots, anime, and craft projects involving beading. She loves teaching at all levels, from kindergarten to undergrad, and hopes to eventually earn a position as a graduate creative writing instructor in a university. She has also worked as a copyeditor and a coordinator of content for textbooks, and harbors nerdy dreams of writing pedagogical standards and course objectives for creative writing curricula.

Tracy has had work published online at PANK and Storyglossia. She writes frequently about outlandish ambitions and gender issues and has approached these ideas through such protagonists as obese rock stars, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the elusive Yeti. Her thesis-in-progress is a novel about a man with psychic powers sailing to Alaska in order to inherit the greatest known psychic shop in the world. 

Tracy will have her public reading this coming Friday, December 3rd, with NMSU MFA alum Dorine Jennette.

Upcoming Reading: Dorine Jennette and Tracy Bowling on December 3rd

The next reading in the La Sociedad Para Las Artes Nelson/Boswell Reading Series will feature NMSU MFA alum Dorine Jennette, reading with graduating MFA Fiction student Tracy Bowling. The reading will take place on Friday, December 3rd, at 7:30 pm in Hardman Hall 106, NMSU campus, with a reception to follow. If you live in or around Southern NM, we hope to see you there! The reading series will begin again in January 2011.

You can purchase Dorine's first book of poetry, Urchin To Follow, here.

3rd Year Student Profile: Erin Reardon

Erin Reardon

Erin really thinks she's more Southern than not, but is met with "But you don't have an accent....?" comments often enough that she'll lay claim to both her Midwestern- and Southern-ness depending on the convenience of the situation.  Born in Ohio and raised in Georgia, Erin, when she stops to think about it, never really imagined that someday she would be in grad school, in the desert--New Mexico!--of all places.

In fact, most of her fiction writing 'career' has come about by happenstance--she liked to read, so why not be an English major in college?  She liked to write too, so let's make that a concentration in creative writing.  Wait, there's another whole degree out there where I can keep learning to be a writer?  Sign me up, she thought. 

Erin did not know what she was getting into.

The MFA has been hard, but Erin is grateful for the writers--both her instructors and fellow students--she's been privileged to work with here.  She has spent the last two and a half years teaching freshman composition and developmental English classes at Dona Ana Community College and has discovered, much to her surprise, that she is rather fond of teaching.

Erin hasn't yet been published--she keeps putting submitting off until her stories are "good enough," whatever that is (Erin is astoundingly good at procrastinating).  And she is not nervous AT ALL about her reading on February 11 with Rosa Alcala.

3rd Year Student Profile: Robert Alan Wendeborn

Robert Alan Wendeborn is a third year MFA poetry student from Aztec, a small town in Northern New Mexico.  He was awarded a fellowship from the Las Cruces Organization of the Literary Arts last November to write in Tuscany over the summer in 2010.  It was an amazing opportunity for him and he’s very grateful.  He feels like his thesis is a million times better for it.  

Robert at his public reading, 9/10/10

Robert is currently an intern for Professor Richard Greenfield's small press, Apostrophe Books.  He finds working with a small press incredibly helpful as a writer.  Robert says of the experience, “every time I work on something for the press I feel like I'm doing something to make me a better writer and poet.”  He is working on typesetting the new book and getting ready to help promote it as well.  He is also currently a poetry editor for Puerto del Sol.  He loves his co-workers at PDS and thinks they are the reason PDS is so cool.

His thesis, tentatively titled I Versus You (There Is No ‘I’ In Mouth, s-k-I-n, and Skin & Mouth Disease are also being considered (he needs help)), is a series of poems that explore gender and identity through the deconstruction of relationships.  Some of his older poems can be found online, though most of those won't be in his thesis.  Works from I Versus You can be found at Strange-Machine.com and others are forthcoming in the October issue of PANK, and the next issue of M Review, both online literary journals.

His interests outside of poetry include food, cooking, biking, traveling, commercials, body art/modification and fashion.  After he graduates, he hopes to attend a Phd program in creative writing or move to Detroit to teach high school/plant a garden.

3rd Year Student Profile: Elizabeth Brasher

Note: This is the first in a series profiling New Mexico State University MFA students in their 3rd and last year of the program. Check back weekly or so to learn about the intellectually and creatively diverse graduate students studying writing here at NMSU.

Elizabeth Brasher

Originally from the three-stoplight town of Bloomfield, New Mexico, Elizabeth Brasher is currently completing her MFA in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry at NMSU, where she teaches composition and creative writing and works as an associate editor for the literary journal, Puerto del Sol. Elizabeth is an assistant editor for Bone Bouquet, an online journal of women’s poetry, and she writes for Feminist Review. She is also a volunteer with Women for Afghan Women. She holds an MA in literature and a BA in English, and lives in Las Cruces with her husband and daughter.

Her work, mostly poetry and essay, focuses on the intersections between Women as a construct and women in the everyday domestic and work environments. Her work has not made an appearance in any literary journals, but she remains slightly optimistic about the possibility. She would like to teach creative writing at a college or university after she graduates.

Elizabeth will have her public reading on October 22nd with poet Cynthia Hogue, as part of the La Sociedad Para Las Artes Nelson/Boswell Reading Series