Life of a Writer: News & Events
September 2014
Students
Tara Anderson (PW) and Taj Whitesell (SW) will have their 10-minute plays featured in the Fourth Annual Ten-Tucky Play Festival at the Bard’s Town in Louisville, Kentucky. Chosen from over 200 submissions, Tara’s play “Shop at Home” and Taj’s play “The Bubble,” along with the other selected plays, will be performed in the upstairs theatre at the Bard’s Town September 18-21 and 25-28 at 7:30p.m. Tickets can be reserved online at The Bard’s Town.
Brittany Bryant (P) will have her nonfiction essay “The Second Chance” and three poems, “Zemblanity,” “Sunday Afternoon,” and “The Problem with Being a Romantic Is,” featured in the 2014 edition of Envoi, which will be made available for the Kindle on Amazon this fall.
Jessica Evans (F) has recently been awarded an Honorable Mention for her flash fiction piece, “Double Back Mule,” from the Carnegie Center in Lexington, Kentucky. Her poem “chapped ” is slated to appear in the poetry journal Adanna, publishing this fall.
Faculty and Staff
Dianne Aprile was the featured writer in August at a Seattle Salon, hosted by poet Ann Teplick. Dianne read from her work, talked about writing and Spalding’s MFA program, and sold books! Her collaborative book project with photographer Julius Friedman is in print now. She edited and contributed to The Book, which will be on display in Louisville in September at a contributors’ reading at the Portland Museum. Dianne also taught a one-day course on flash nonfiction at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House on May 17 and is teaching a six-week class there this fall on Walking and Writing. She will attend the three-day Lit Fuse poetry festival in eastern Washington in September.
David-Matthew Barnes’s new novel, Stronger Than This (written in epistolary form), was recently published by Bold Strokes Books. Excerpts from two of his stage plays, Baby in the Basement and Better Places to Go, are featured in the new collection Audition Monologues for Young Women (Meriwether Publishing). David-Matthew recently served as a Young Author Critique Mentor for the Colorado Teen Literature Conference. He will be directing the world premieres of three new plays as part of the Rocky Mountain Short Play Festival. He recently created Bloom, a teen web series that starts production this fall in Denver. He has just been commissioned by Emmy Award-winning producer Paco Aguilar to write Out of Body, a paranormal feature film that goes into production this fall in Los Angeles.
Roy Hoffman was interviewed about his novel, Come Landfall, by Spalding MFA grad Bill Goodman on Kentucky’s public TV station, KET, which aired July 13 (watch the video), and by MFA grad Katerina Stoykova-Klemer on her radio show, Accents, which aired May 30 (listen to the audio), after spending a day in Lexington with colleague Karen Mann, who presented her novel, The Woman of La Mancha. Concerning Come Landfall, Roy served on a panel, “On the Fringes of War,” at the Decatur Book Festival on August 30, and is the featured author of “A Moveable Feast,” a luncheon and signing sponsored by Litchfield Books, Pawleys Island, South Carolina, at 11:00 a.m. on September 12. Roy’s review of Frances Mayes’s Under Magnolia was in the New York Times Book Review on June 15. On July 20, he led a discussion in Mobile about the film Au Revoir Les Enfants as part of a series at Spring Hill College on the films of Vichy, France.
Alumni
On October 6, Susan Arscott’s (W4CYA, F ’12) first full-length young adult book, The End of Normal, will be published by Burst Books. It will be available in e-format from all online booksellers. This is a completely revised version of her thesis.
Deborah Begel’s (CNF ’06) documentary about water contamination on Navajo lands, Four Stories about Water, was shown at the Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro in May; it will be shown in Berlin in September and in Jordan later in the fall. She also edited a chapbook of student writings, Crossings, for the Summer Bridge program at Northern New Mexico College again this year. She was a founder and CNF editor of the college’s new literary journal, Trickster, which launched last spring.
This fall, Glenny Brock (CNF ’07) begins her fifth semester teaching “Writing for the Media” at Birmingham-Southern College, where she also serves as faculty sponsor for the student newspaper. Back in the spring, Glenny made her first foray into speech writing as one of the featured presenters at the 2014 TEDxBirmingham conference. Watch a video of her talk, titled “Movie Brats & Show People.”