Another Semester of Exciting Readings Ends

We thank everyone-- our readers, our graduating MFA students, our audiences, and the La Soc staff, for a fantastic year of readings. Below are images from the last three reading events. 

Poet Jon Davis read on April 13, 2012.  He is the author of three chapbooks and three full-length collections of poetry. The Bloomsbury Reviewsaid of his collection Preliminary Report: "This is one of the best books of poetry to appear this year." He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a Lannan Literary Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of America Poets. For the past twenty years, he has been a professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Jon Davis becomes his alter ego on stage: Chuck Calabrese.

Camille Acker, MFA (Fiction) '12, reading on April 13.

Kit McIlroy read on April 20, 2012. He is the author of a short story collection All My Relations, winner of the 1994 Flannery O'Connor Award, and his stories have been anthologized widely, including in the Best American Short Stories series. He has served on the Arizona Commission on the Arts since 1979, and in 1986, he co-founded ArtsReach, which brings writing programs to Native American communities in southern Arizona. He is also the author of Here I Am A Writer, a book that grew out of that experience, featuring ten of his former students, their writings, and life stories based on interviews. He conducted a training session with students in NMSU's school outreach program the following day, Saturday, April 21, 2012.

Chris Schacht, MFA (Fiction) '12, reading on April 20.

Blake Butler is the author of the novel There Is No Year, the novella Ever, and the novel-in-stories Scorch Atlas. He edits “the internet literature magazine blog of the future” HTMLGiant, as well as two journals of innovative text, Lamination Colony and No Colony. He lives in Atlanta. He read on April 27, 2012. 

Anna Pattison, MFA (Fiction) '12, reads on April 27, 2012.

Poetry Faculty Carmen Giménez Smith Publishes New Award Winning Book

Poetry Faculty Carmen Giménez Smith Publishes New Book, Goodbye, Flicker, Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry

This distinctive collection introduces a new type of mythmaking, daring in its marriage of fairy tale tropes with American mundanities. Conspiratorial, Goodbye, Flicker describes the interior life of a girl whose prince is a deadbeat dad and whose escape into a fantasy world is also an escape into language, beauty, and the surreal.

 “Carmen Giménez Smith’s Goodbye, Flicker takes on poetry, family, myth, fairy tale, memory, love, history, and our plain ordinary human stories. Magic and invention are taken for granted. Cómo se dice is what all poems say. Giménez Smith happens to say so with deliverance and desire that can break into anyone’s heart."—Dara Wier, author of Selected Poems and Reverse Rapture


“It's as if Giménez Smith threw a stone called 'girl' into the pond of psyche—a psyche both personal and collective—and these are the ripples.  The archetypal and the daily—its engine of class, race and gender—come fully forward in this terrific book, where lyric and narrative modes play, where 'Tale is a world / of condition,’ where every She seeks to change her story.”—Dana Levin, author of In the Surgical Theater and Sky Burial

Graduate Student Awards in Creative Writing

Congratulations to Megan Wong, MFA '12, who won the Harris-Kunz Award for her outstanding poetry thesis.  Megan had tough competition from her fellow poets this year, and we congratulate all of them on their recent successful defenses and upcoming graduation. 

Congratulations to Kelsie Hahn, MFA '13, who won the Kevin McIlvoy Endowed Fellowship Award, which is awarded to a second-year MFA graduate student for excellence in service to the creative writing program. Kelsie's involvement as an editor of Puerto del Sol and as a participant in the WITS program were just a few of the reasons faculty chose her.

Carrie Murphy (MFA '11) Publishes First Full-Length Book

We're thrilled to announce Carrie Murphy, MFA '11, has published her first full-length book, Pretty Tilt, with Keyhole Press. We couldn't be more proud of her. For more information about purchasing the book, go here.  Her chapbook, Meet the Lavenders, appeared in 2011 from Birds of Lace.  She currently works as a teacher and freelance writer.  She will be doing a number of readings in support of Pretty Tilt:

• Fri. April 13 (xtra spooky!), Brooklyn, NY at The Mustard Beak w/Gina Abelkop, Niina Pollari, Rohin Guha and Jason Helm, 7.30pm

• Sun. April 15, Washington, DC- Three Tents Reading Series w/Gina Abelkop, Eugene Cross and Joe Hall

• Mon. April 16, Durham, NC- Finger & Thumb inaugural reading w/Kate Zambreno and Gina Abelkop @ The Pinhook, 6.30pm

Here are the blurbs for the book: 

Carrie Murphy writes the ambiguous and ambivalent viscera beneath the surface of the pretty girl in her “tragic dresses,” quoting the canon of girlhood - Clueless and Tori Amos and Dirty Dancing and Disney and My Little Pony. "The tools I used/to write myself a girl." Her girls are gooshy and oozey and bleeding and bothered and wanting and horny as hell, like craven and craving Molly Blooms.  Like if the Lisbon sisters grew up in the nineties and were not projections but desirous, desiring of the icky, beautiful boys, writing of crusted panties and the phenomenology of the blow job or wanting to fuck a 15-year-old Prince William at his mother’s funeral. “All we have in common is our colossal boredom.”  These poems are hilarious, joyful, dirty, deeply felt, fucked, totally inappropriate, gorgeous. --Kate Zambreno, author of Green Girl and Heroines

In Carrie Murphy’s dazzling poem “Mirrorball,” there is the realized tautology that “To be luminous is to acquiesce, to acquiesce is to be luminous.” It would be tempting to classify the spinning surface delights of this book into the categories of the girlish, the sex kitten, the raunchy, or the princess, but then the rigorous self-awareness of these poems would be ignored. Unappeasable, disastrous carnal appetite loudly proclaims itself from behind a myriad of masks, but when the tender self finally “unbraids,” it blinds everyone who sees it. Pretty Tilt is a radiant debut.  --Richard Greenfield, author of A Carnage in the Lovetrees and Tracer

Pretty Tilt is an utterly engaging love letter to the incandescent moments that, when threaded together, represent girlhood--young women on the cusp of something just beyond themselves, reaching, fumbling, falling, in sometimes glorious, sometimes garish, but always beautifully rendered, unflinching ways.--Roxane Gay, author of Ayiti

Carrie Murphy’s Pretty Tilt aches my body like the Sweetarts she invokes in the first devastating poem of the book. Every girl inside its pages is full to bursting like an ulcer waiting to wreak its havoc, your stomach made a tender, loving carapace for them despite their reckless living. Each bong hit, backseat fuck and curious touch splits me open with a desire to reach inside the page and stroke each girl’s dirty, sweaty head. Pretty Tilt is full of a love, ferocity and skill of creation that will stun you like an accidental football to the face in gym class.--Gina Abelkop, author of Darling Beastlettes

Camilo Roldán's Translation of Amílkar U.

Camilo Roldán, who graduated with a BA in English and Spanish from New Mexico State University, has published a chapbook-length translation of Colombian poet Amílkar U., (pen name of Amílcar Osorio) with These Signals Press. For more information, go to http://thesesignals.com/tsp004/

LOLA Italy Writing Residence Fellowships for 2012 Announced

The 2012 LOLA Italy Residence Fellowships have been awarded to the following NMSU MFA candidates:

Sessily Watt is most recently from Chicago, IL, where she spent three years working with a small group of dedicated writers before deciding to study writing in an academic setting. She is in her second semester in the MFA program at NMSU.

Angela Simental is an MA student focusing on fiction. She received her undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Communications in 2008.

Floydd Michael Elliott is originally from Portland, OR, and is currently working on his MFA (with an emphasis in Creative Writing: Poetry) here at NMSU. He’s a father, husband, poet, writer, teacher, and student coordinator for La Sociedad Para Las Artes – the English department’s community outreach program.  His work has appeared in Sin Frontiers/Writer’s Without Borders and DIN.  

For more information about the residency, visit: http://summerwritingretreat.com/the-retreat-centers/spannocchia-tuscany-july-3-17-2012/

Recent Creative Writing Events at NMSU

On February 10, Robert Snyderman presented "The Storm Is Not Outside Us: A Seminar on Spirit and Nomadism in Besmilr Brigham's Poetry"

Besmilr Moore Brigham was an award-winning poet and short-story writer who lived in Arkansas for decades. She came to prominence during the women’s movement of the 1960s, and her work is noted for its innovative structure, sound, and rhythm.  Her writing was experimental, often seeming to migrate across the page in the same way Brigham and her husband liked to migrate in life. She employed erratic, though purposeful, punctuation, which produced a rhythm instead of following the rules of grammar. In the 1950s she studied with poet Robert Duncan and at the New School for Social Research. In 1970, Brigham received a Discovery Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The accompanying NEA grant led to a collection of her work, Heaved from the Earth, which was published by Knopf in 1971. Brigham’s poems had been published in New Directions, Harper’s Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times. She also published short stories, including, “The Lottery Drawing,” in the anthology Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth. After a flurry of publishing in the 1960s and 1970s, Brigham dropped from the eyes of the publishing world and lived in relative obscurity.  In 1993, Brigham was rediscovered by C. D. Wright for Wright’s Lost Roads Project and was included in the Corporation for Public Broadcasting documentary United States of Poetry, which included Brigham and her son-in-law, poet Keith Wilson. Wright described Brigham and her husband as “the last free people. They hadn’t been broken by the life they had chosen, which was itinerant and subsistent. They treated their life like an adventure and her work like a staple, like beans.”  A posthumous compilation of her work, Run through Rock, was selected and edited by Wright,  who published it through her imprint, Lost Roads Press. (Source: )

For his presentation, Robert Snyderman, a poet completing graduate studies at Brown University, has put together 17 poems published in journals and magazines in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Students from the MFA program at NMSU will read these poems aloud and will participate in an open discussion of the work. Heloise Wilson, daughter of Besmilr Brigham and a resident of Las Cruces, will also participate. If you are interested in reading poems aloud, please contact Megan Wong at mmwhite@nmsu.edu. 









On February 15, Dot Devota, Brandon Shimoda, and Zachary Schomburg read in the HSS Annex Auditorium.

DOT DEVOTA is from a family of ranchers and rodeo stars. She is the author of The Eternal Wall (Cannibal Books), MW: A Midwest Field Guide (Editions 19\), and Scenes From My Massacre (Urgent Series). Her poems can also be found in Action Yes, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Muthafucka, VOLT and in Old Franklin, Missouri. 

ZACHARY SCHOMBURG is the author of Fjords Volume 1 (Black Ocean, 2012), Scary, No Scary (Black Ocean 2009), and The Man Suit (Black Ocean 2007), as well as several small press chapbooks. His The Book of Joshua will be published by McSweeney's in 2013. With Mathias Svalina, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Books. 

BRANDON SHIMODA is the author of O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011), The Girl Without Arms (Black Ocean, 2011), and The Alps (Flim Forum, 2008)—among other solo and collaborative works of various sizes and shapes. He was born in California, has lived most recently in Missouri, Maine and Taiwan, though currently lives in Arizona.

On February 24, poet Joni Wallace read in Hardman Hall as part of the La Sociedad para las Artes.