where still the wind comes and blows
like Resurrection’s afterthought.

Night

Inverted canoes stationed along the shore;
Unattended sarcophagi by the boiling foam.

God breathes

Ink-splashes of the Unsaid above the Arabic-scripted sea.

 

Aslan Cohen is a graduate student at the Divinity School.

As the academic year draws to a close, it is time to celebrate the achievements of faculty, guest lecturers, staff, alumni and students. Below you will see what is probably only a sample of their impressive record of publication. Please let us know if we have omitted your achievements – it is important for us to record publications and prizes to encourage our new students, already signing up for next year’s courses. Although Will Boast will be on leave in Rome next year (collectively we struggle against our envy), we’ll be welcoming Chicu Reddy and Jen Scappettone back among us, and soon will announce an extraordinary lineup of events. Enjoy the summer!

John Wilkinson
Chair of Creative Writing

Student Achievements

During her time at UChicago, Asnia Asim’s poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in the following journals: The Columbia Review, Southern Humanities Review, Quiddity, The Homestead Journal, and Spillway Magazine.

Beca Baca won the John Billings Fiske Poetry Prize for her work titled “One More.” She will pursue her MFA in poetry at Columbia University.

For his essay “Bellas Artes” about Santiago, Chile, Christopher Bello won the Margaret C. Annan Nonfiction Award, which recognizes excellence in creative writing by third-year students in the College.

Xan Belzley won the David Blair McLaughlin Second Prize for her essay “The Misogynist in Me,” demonstrating special skill and sense of form in the writing of English prose.

Dan Cronin won the Janel Mueller Undergraduate Thesis Prize in English and American Literature for his creative nonfiction thesis, “On Drag.” It also won the David Blair McLaughlin First Prize for special skill and sense of form in the essay. Dan has parlayed his thesis into a job assisting documentary filmmaker David France (“How to Survive a Plague”) on his next film, about the history of drag queens.

Emma Dries is now working in the editorial department at Alfred A. Knopf.

Lily Dube won the Elsie Filippi Memorial Prize in Poetry, which is presented each year to a student who shows distinction in poetic composition.

Jenzo DuQue won the Olga and Paul Menn Foundation First Prize, awarded for an original short story or novel, for his piece “In Thin and Particular Flames.” He is also the recipient of the Janel Mueller Undergraduate Thesis Prize in English and American Literature for his B.A. titled “Wherever and Whatever These Clouds Were Before.”

Rebecca Edwards won the Olga and Paul Menn Foundation Second Prize, awarded for an original short story or novel, for her piece “Impeccable Fruit.”

Ellen Goff will be working with Sanford J. Greenburger Associates in New York City, a literary scouting agency that works on behalf of international publishers to see what books in American markets would be good candidates for translation and international sale. She will specifically be working in the Children’s and Young Adult literature branch of the agency.

JanaShaan Heng-Devan was awarded the 2015 Millard Pierce Binyon Memorial Prize for Distinction in Humanistic Pursuits in the College Community. Following graduation, he will be doing Teach for America in Chicago.

Enal Hindi had an essay accepted by Harper’s magazine.

Tote Hughes’s novella Fountain was published by Miami University Press in November 2014.

Kirsten Ihns, who graduated in 2012, has been accepted into the MFA program at Iowa.

Aarti Iyer was accepted into Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction.

For her work “Small Beasts,” Cindy Ji won the Margaret C. Annan Poetry Award, which recognizes excellence in creative writing by third-year students in the College.

Samantha Karas will be moving to Austin in August to pursue an MFA in poetry and screenwriting at the prestigious Michener Center for Writers.

Former MAPH student Eric McMillan published a story in Gulf Coast magazine.

Brian Ng was named a finalist in Cha Magazine’s poetry contest for his piece titled “At My Grandfather’s Funeral.”

Margeaux Perkins will teach creative writing in Hong Kong with a private education consulting firm, ARCH Academy. She was also published this past summer in Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Book of the Year 2014 and on their website.

For her memoir-in-progress about Israel and Palestine, Divinity School student Rebecca Sacks was accepted to the New York State Writers Institute, where she’ll study nonfiction with Phillip Lopate. Rebecca also won full scholarships to this summer’s Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, where she’ll study nonfiction with Ted Conover, and to the University of Massachusetts Juniper Summer Writing Institute.

Liana Sonenclar won an honorable mention in the Al Blanchard Award for crime fiction; she’ll be attending the conference in November.

Preston (Andrew) Thomas will intern at Jon Shestack Productions in Los Angeles.

For her work “Christmas in April,” Willa Zhang won the Margaret C. Annan Fiction Award, which recognizes excellence in creative writing by third-year students in the College.

Faculty Achievements

Will Boast was awarded the John Guare Writer’s Fund Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir, Epilogue, is a New York Times bestseller.

Rachel DeWoskin’s novel Blind, published by Penguin in August, was shortlisted by YALSA for Best Fiction of 2014 and selected as a Junior Library Guild 2015 Read. Not only did Sundance Television option her memoir, Foreign Babes in Beijing, in February, they also hired Rachel and her husband, playwright and screenwriter Zayd Dohrn, to write the pilot episode.

David Maclean’s book, The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia, was named the Best Memoir in the Midwest by The Society of Midland Authors.

Dan Raeburn finished his memoir, Vessels, and sold it to WW Norton; it will be out in March 2016. He has also been awarded the university’s Janel M. Mueller Award for Excellence in Pedagogy.

WW Norton will publish Vu Tran’s novel, Dragonfish, on August 3. He’ll also be attending the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a Fiction Fellow August 12-22.

John Wilkinson’s poem “Schlummert Ein” appeared in Poetry, and his essay “Drift and Pop: On Reading W.S. Graham” will be in the July/August issue. His paper on lyric, “Repeatable Evanescence” appeared in Thinking Verse, and he edited a special issue of Critical Quarterly on Game of Thrones.

A: A wail of a wub.

Q: What does an organized religion both aspire to and, distinctly, fear?
A: A hale of a hub.

Q: What part does theology play in such an aspiration?

A: A sail of a sub.

Q: What consolation does one resort to?
A: A pail of a pub.

Q: What is religion?

A: A nail of a nub.

Brian Ng is a third-year majoring in Economics and English Literature. He received a Summer Arts grant from the UChicago Arts Council, and is working on a chapbook and a play on security exploits.

Vehemence in deity or coalition dearth ensures.
Upon joyful spite all worldly blunder depends.
O optative art, – its slovenly soar, choirboys’ mouths
Drooling past pews of fading alms – access is denied.

Next up, revolutions mark umbra on the screen.
The sketches pile even as the marriage is annulled.
The office has ceased to be Euclidean. So, let hence
Be hence. In profile, the weaker eye is forgiven.

Brian Ng is a third-year majoring in Economics and English Literature. He received a Summer Arts grant from the UChicago Arts Council, and is working on a chapbook and a play on security exploits.

This poem is reprinted with permission from Matter.

Christopher Kempf is a Ph.D. student in English Literature at the University of Chicago.  A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, his poetry and essays have appeared most recently in Gulf Coast, Jacobin, Kenyon Review, The New Inquiry, and The New Republic, among other places.  He received his MFA from Cornell University. Read more of his work at   christopherkempf.tumblr.com.

 

my grandfather stands behind me—

his brittle palms on my shoulders,

birthing a scene I will never witness.

Through each rasp he swings his arms,

cutting air in dry arcs, with his poison so tender

that I can’t grasp how my father

could resist such a performance.

And how I, at the ripe age

of carefree, manage a sighing surrender

under the weight of our history.

I have half my father’s years,

but twice my father’s fears in my follicles.

His first job he cut his hand for three dollars and sixty jiffies,

still his boss wouldn’t sweat the damage.

Heal with it, he said.

In New York, Dad couldn’t read

but spoke a sentence the length

of his strides across the desert highway.

“Window seat, no-smoking.”

Even then, on a plane with no money

nicotine had its price.

Yet I’ve the entire English language at my disposal

and still no vocal chords.

Porcelain I’s dotted neat spill from my teeth,

I speak white

—beneath, my R’s are rolled,

my thighs are pulled pork; I can’t coagulate.

Only smoke puts my Indian knees at ease; I’m short of death,

Searching for words in this foreign tongue and ancestral breath.