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Alumni News

 

William Archila ’02
William Archila’s poems have recently appeared in the Crab Orchard Review and Obsidian III. His poem, “Bury This Pig,” will be published in Agni in the fall. “Latest News,” and “Immigration Blues, 1980,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Bilingual Review.

Chi-Wai Au ’99
Chi-Wai Au’s chapbook, Narcissus at the River and Other Poems, was published in April 2005 by Aisarema, a nonprofit literary arts organization in Los Angeles. Currently, he lives and writes in Los Angeles.

Becca Barniskis ’01
Becca Barniskis lives in Minnesota where she is Fine Arts Coordinator for Sheridan School in Minneapolis. Her poems have been published in Verse Daily, The Northwest Review, The Laurel Review, The Red Rock Review, and Poetry Northwest.

Nick Barrett ’95
Nick Barrett has been published in Seattle Review, Poet Lore, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches community college.

Lory Bedikian ’02
Lory Bedikian’s work has appeared in Westwind, Drumvoices Revue, Timberline, Harpur Palate, Ararat, and in a special issue of the Crab Orchard Review: “Wander This World: Immigration, Migration and Exile.” One of her poems was recently selected for the Common Prayers Project by Writers at Work in Los Angeles for citywide distribution. Since graduation, she has given readings at California State University at North-ridge, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, KPFK’s Inspiration House, The World Stage, and the YWCA of Pasadena. Bedikian received the Alpha Gamma Sigma Honor Society’s Award for “Most Devoted Instructor,” at Citrus College in Glendora, California, for 2002-2003.

Tina (Eskes) Boscha ’02
Tina Boscha was recently awarded a travel grant from the Center for the Study of Women in Society to support revision work on her novel-in-progress, River in the Sea, which she began while a student in the M.F.A. program.

Stacey Brown ’96
Stacey Lynn Brown read with her husband, the poet Adrian Matejka, at the Windfall Reading Series in Eugene on February 21st. Recent poems from her manuscript have been published in Crab Orchard Review, Natural Bridge, and Mot Juste and are archived online at fishousepoems.org. Stacey teaches Language and Literature at Lane Community College and recently welcomed a baby girl.

Jose Chaves ’99
Jose Chaves was a Fulbright Fellow in Columbia. He has published a book of translations of Latin American prose and stories, and has also been published in Highbeams, Octavo, Jeopardy, and CrossXConnect. He teaches at Lane Community College.

Serena Crawford, ’98
Since graduation, Serena Crawford’s short stories have appeared in Epoch, Another Chicago Magazine, Nimrod, The Florida Review, Other Voices, The Greensboro Review, Sonora Review, Hawaii Review, New Delta Review, and elsewhere.

Debra Dean ’92
Debra Dean’s novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, was recently bought by William Morrow/HarperCollins, and will be published in January 2006. Rights have also been sold to Germany, the U.K., Canada, Denmark, and Brazil. Her short story collection is due out the following year from the same publisher.

Allison Dubinsky ’99
Allison Dubinsky works as a freelance writer, editor, and proofreader in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have been published in Hubbub, eye-rhyme, and Tin House.

Miriam Gershaw ’02
Miriam Gershow's short story A Step Ahead, will appear in the next issue of Black Warrior Review. Her stories have also appeared in Gulf Coast, The Journal, Nimrod, and The Madison Review.

Eugene Gloria '92
Eugene Gloria's second collection of poems, Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006) will be released at the end of March. The Academy of American Poets and Penguin Books will be co-sponsoring a reading on April 2, 2006 at Verlaine Cafe in the Lower East Side in New York.

Kate Lynn Hibbard ’99
Kate Lynn Hibbard won the 2004 Gerald Cable Book Award for Sleeping Upside Down (Silverfish Review Press). She is the recipient of a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant for Minnesota writers. Kate is an instructor of writing and literature at Minneapolis College. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, Seattle Review, Ploughshares, and Crab Orchard Review. She has also been awarded a McKnight Artist Fellowship in Writing and a Provincetown Arts travel grant to study with Catherine Bowman.

Major Jackson ’99
Major Jackson was nominated for a 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for his debut volume, Leaving Saturn, which was the recipient of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He is currently a Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont. In Spring 2006, he will serve as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Hoops, his second book of poems, will be published in March 2006, upcoming readings can be found at www.majorjackson.com.

Jamie Keene ’04
Jamie Keene’s short story, Alice’s House, was selected by Guest Editor Jane Smiley and Series Editors John Kulka and Natalie Danford for inclusion in the Best New American Voices 2006 anthology.

Jeffrey Klausman ’86
Since graduating in 1986, Jeffrey Klausman worked in Tokyo for three years and then Portland for four more teaching E.S.L. He finished a Doctor of Arts at Idaho State in 1996 and has been teaching English and Philosophy at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, ever since. His book of poems, A Season Along Bellingham Bay, was published by Mellen Poetry Press in July 2004. He’s also published a number stories and poems in small literary journals. He received an Artist Trust GAP Award in 2002 for poetry (from a non-profit arts organization in Washington State). He and his wife, Kelly Quinn, have a son, Adam, born on October 3, 2004. He was recently awarded Exemplary Faculty Status by the Washington Community and Technical College Humanities Association for outstanding contribution to the humanities.

Christian Knoeller ’81
After graduating, Christian Knoeller spent five years in Juneau, Alaska, where Devil’s Club Press published his first chapbook, Song in Brown Bear Country. Afterwards, he returned to the “lower 48” to get a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently an Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. His collection of poems, Completing of the Circle (Buttonwood Press, 2000), was awarded the Millennium Prize in a national open competition. He lives with his wife Julie, daughter Annie, four dogs, and two cats in a Victorian farmhouse with 15 acres on Deer Creek in Camden, Indiana. He recently completed a 1000-mile bicycle tour tracing the Lewis and Clark route from Great Falls, Montana to Portland, Oregon. He has also written a brief article chronicling the trip.

Brandy McKenzie ’01
Brandy McKenzie lives with her family in the Portland area where she teaches college writing and literature. Her work has been published in a number of magazines, including The Connecticut Review, Cottonwood, and The Comstock Review.

Philip Memmer ’95
Philip Memmer was born in Ohio, and has lived in Illinois, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Southern Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Tar River Poetry, and many other journals and anthologies. He is the also author of two chapbooks of poems, For Resident (FootHills Publishing, 2002) and The Apartment (piccadilly press, 2001). His first full-length collection, Sweetheart, Baby, Darling, was published by Word Press in 2004. He now lives in upstate New York, where he edits the poetry journal Two Rivers Review and directs the Downtown Writer’s Center, the Syracuse affiliate of the YMCA National Writer’s Voice. He and his wife Michelle had their second child in March 2006.

Paige Newman ’97
Paige Newman is the Movies Editor at MSNBC.com, which involves producing and editing the film section of the Web site. She also writes entertainment columns for MSNBC.com.

Jude Nutter ’98
Jude Nutter's second collection The Curator of Silence, which won the 2006 Ernest Sandeen Prize, is coming out this October (University Of Notre Dame Press). Last year, she spent two months in Antarctica with the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers Program working on a collection of poems and pastels/paintings. She is currently working on a third collection of poems dealing with war and conflict: a selection of poems from this manuscript won the 2005 International War Poetry Contest.

Gina Ochsner ’97
Gina Ochsner’s collection of short stories, The Necessary Grace to Fall, was published in 2002 by the University of Georgia Press and selected for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Ochsner’s newest collection of stories, People I Wanted to Be, was published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2005.

Laura Passin ’03
Laura Passin now lives in Evanstan, Illinois, where she is pursuing her English PhD at Northwestern University. Previously, while living in Seattle, Washington, she worked as a freelance editor for Jones and Bartlett publishers and taught part-time for Kaplan Test Prep.

April Petross ’97
April Petross is a copy editor at a newswire service, reader for Tin House, and has published in Poet Lore.

Augie Porras ’97

Augie Porras has been published in The Alaska Review, ZYZZYVA, Rivendell, and Rattle.

Sonya B. Posmentier ’97
Sonya B. Posmentier lives in New York City, where she is an English teacher and Director of Multicultural Affairs at Trinity School. She is the recipient of a 2003 Brio Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and her poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Phoebe, Seneca Review, and Lyric.

Susan Rich ’96
Susan Rich has work forthcoming in the anthology Family Matters due out this winter from Bottom Dog Press. Poems are also forthcoming in International Poetry Review, Poetry East, Quarterly West, and Talking River Review. Rich will guest edit the upcoming issue of In Posse Review. She also continues her work as an editor at Floating Bridge Press in Seattle.

Joshua Robbins '03
Joshua Robbins is a teacher of English at Johnson Community College in Lawrence, Kansas. In the spring, he will teach a poetry workshop at the Lansing State Correctional Facility. Josh also writes a poetry column for the Lawrence Journal World Newspaper.

Jeff Schultz ’03
Jeff Schultz lives in Eugene and teaches at Chemeketa College.

Sarah Seybold ’04
Sarah Seybold is a teacher of English Composition at Clark College and Chemeketa College.

Brian Simoneau ’02
Brian Simoneau’s poems have appeared in Red Rock Review and Tiger's Eye: A Journal of Poetry. He teaches at the Woodside Priory School in Portola Valley, California.

Lysley Tenorio 98
Lysley Tenorio just started her third year as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, CA. She was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction from 2000 to 2002 and has done residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell in the past year. She had stories published in Ploughshares, The Chicago Tribune, The Atlantic, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices. Her story Monstress was nominated for a 2004 National Magazine Award, and her story The Brothers was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is currently finishing her first collection of stories.

Brian Turner ’96
Brian Turner lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. Prior to that, he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film of the same name. His first collection of poems, Here, Bullet, has been described by The New York Times as "a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq War by a solider-poet." The collection, based upon Turner's year-long tour in Iraq as an infantry team leader, is the winner of the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award.

Lora Vahlsing ’00
Lora Vahlsing lives in Eugene, where she works at Holt International Children’s Services in the Post-Adoption Services Department. After graduating, she taught English at a language institute in Korea. Afterwards, she returned to her home state of Wisconsin and then moved back to Eugene. She has recently begun work on a memoir.

Alana Noel Voth ’04
Alana Noel Voth’s short story, Genuflection, was published by Best Gay Erotica 2004, and then went on to be nominated and selected for Best American Erotica 2005, which is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster. Voth is currently teaching at Pioneer Pacific College.

Ross West ’84
After graduating, Ross West worked as a freelancer in Eugene, writing a little of everything—features articles, annual reports, video scripts, film reviews, and radio journalism—for various publications (Orion Nature Quarterly, Clinton St. Quarterly, ICON Thoughtstyle, Oregon Quarterly, The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, The Oregonian) and clients. In 1995, he was hired as the science writer for the UO Office of Communications where he was editor of the university’s research magazine Inquiry. He served as text editor for the Atlas of Oregon and had one of his pieces anthologized in Best Essays Northwest. He is currently managing editor of Oregon Quarterly.

Kate Westhaver ’02
Kate Westhaver was a winner of the Pen Center West Boyden Residency, Rogue Woods, Oregon.

Dawn Diaz Willis ’98
Dawn Diez Willis is the founding editor of the annual creative arts journal, Through Our Eyes, which features selection, design, layout, and editing by incarcerated juveniles. Her own work has appeared in various journals including The Iowa Review, ZYZZYVA, and Berkeley Poetry Review. She has served as an assistant editor at The Northwest Review and was the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship. Currently, she lives in Salem, Oregon, with her husband, Kevin, and their daughter, Djuna Amelie, and is at work on both a novel and a poetry manuscript.

John Witte ’78
John Witte’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Southern Review, and The Norton Introduction to Literature, among many other journals and anthologies. He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a residency at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and numerous other grants and awards. His first book, Loving the Days, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1978. His second book, The Hurtling, was published by Orchises Press in 2005. He lives with his family in Eugene, where he is the editor of Northwest Review and teaches courses in literature and literary editing at the University of Oregon.

Corrina Wycoff ’01
Corrina Wycoff'a first book, The Wrong Place in the World, has been accepted for publication by the University of Illinois Press's new fiction imprint Other Voices Books. The book will be released in early 2007. She has also published short stories in Other Voices and The Clear Cut Future and an essay in Best Essays Northwest. Her poem, “Rita,” was selected by the Seattle Art Council for Seattle’s “Poetry on the Buses” program in 2004. She was also the recipient of The Hugo House Award, a grant from the Richard Hugo House, a Seattle-based not-for-profit literary arts center. Wycoff currently teaches at Pierce College in Lakewood, Washington.

 
   
 
 
   


Creative Writing Program
5243 University of Oregon
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Phone: (541) 346-3944
Fax: (541) 346-0537
crwrweb@uoregon.edu