A New Decade Begins

At the 2017 summer residency, CWLA's low-residency MFA program celebrated its 10th anniversary. In days of yore, the department operated as a traditional three-year program. For several reasons, the faculty proposed shifting to a low-residency model and university administrators immediately understood the brilliance of their plan. The low-residency program opened for business in Summer 2007 with a lot of enthusiasm, the faith of a brand-new group of students and mentors, and (let's be honest) a teensy bit of trepidation. Twelve days later, Director David Stevenson and his merry band of faculty celebrated the residency's success and then took a long nap.
 
Alumni of the low-residency and original program joined current students and faculty for a celebratory reception. 

In any creative writing program, successes and accomplishments come every day in ways most others don't see. Anybody who keeps writing after graduation is hugely successful. So are those who find and contribute to a literary community. The simplest way to track these kinds of accomplishments is to take note of the number of students who have published short stories, essays, poems, anthologies, articles, and books. We'd need  another 10 years to list every single publication, but here are some highlights.

Nearly all of these books by graduates are based on thesis work:

• Chaun Ballard, poetry, Flight, which won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, judged by Major Jackson. He'll be reading at the Sunken Garden Festival in July alongside current U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (!).

• ​Marie Tozier, poetry, Open the Dark (Boreal Books, Red Hen Press, 2018). Marie recently wrote about her hometown in "Nome--Beautiful Yet Dysfunctional" for We Alaskans. 
• Raquel Gilliland, poetry, Dirt and Honey (Green Writers Press, 2018). She also won the prestigious Rattle Chapbook contest for 2018.
• Marilyn Sigman, nonfiction, Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay (University of Alaska Press, 2018).
• Kersten Christianson, poetry, Something Yet to be Named (Aldrich Press, 2017).
• Vivian Faith Prescott, fiction, The Dead Go to Seattle (Boreal Books, 2017).
• Mary Kudenov, nonfiction, Threadbare; Class and Crime in Urban Alaska (University of Alaska Press, 2017). Mary's book was also a UAA Book of the Year choice.
• Seta Kabranian-Melkonian, nonfiction, The Consecrated Ones: Garlen Ananian’s Path (Abril Books, 2017).
• Lisa Stice, poetry, Permanent Change of Station (Middle West Press, 2018) and Uniform (Aldrich Press, 2016).
• Heather Lende, nonfiction, Find the Good: Unexpected Life Lessons from a Small-Town Obituary Writer (Algonquin Books, 2015).
• Allison Williams, nonfiction, Pacific Northwest Road Trip (Moon Travel, 2015).
• Hannah Lindoff, fiction, Mary’s Wild Winter Feast (University of Alaska Press, 2014).
• Justin Herrmann, fiction, Highway One, Antarctica (Madhat Press, 2014).
• Sara Loewen, nonfiction, Gaining Daylight: Life on Two Islands (University of Alaska Press, 2014), which earned a starred review by Publisher’s Weekly and the Willa Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction.
• Vivian Faith Prescott, poetry, The Hide of My Tongue: Ax L'óot' Doogú (Plain View Press, 2012).
• Vivian Faith Prescott, fiction, Keeper of the Directions (Euterpa, 2012, under the pen name L.K. Mitchell).

A few recent accomplishments and awards include:

• For the third year in a row, Matt Komatsu has organized and taught in Danger Close Alaska, a joint 49 Writers and Alaska Humanities Forum program to build a literary community of civilians and veterans.
• Charles Boyle, who is graduating in 2018, recently published "Would I Want My Kid to Turn Out Like Charles Wohflforth? Maybe Not," in the Anchorage Daily News. 
• Vered Mared opened The Writer's Block Bookstore & Cafe, a huge supporter of writers and artists in Anchorage and elsewhere.
• Tamar Bolkvadze’s play was accepted into the 2017 Last Frontier Theatre Conference, and she received a Women Writer’s Fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts.
• Pamela Kearney’s thesis novel, The Sunflower Wife, was a runner-up in the 2012 The AWP Award Series for the Novel, a national contest that attracted at least 10,000 entries.
• Ben Toche’s novel Dispatches from the SpEd Department was a finalist in the 2017 Knut House Press annual contest.
• Teresa Sundmark won the Nicole Blizzard Short Story Contest.
• Cass Crandall was the 2015 Grand Prize winner of the Anchorage Daily News creative writing contest (and the winner of the Nonfiction Open to the Public category).
• Poems, essays, and fiction by several students have been named as finalists or runners-up in literary contests at Fourth Genre, Ninth Letters, Nimrod, The Iowa Review, and the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, among others.
• Matt Komatsu, Sara Loewen, and Vivian Faith Prescott each won $5,000 Literary Awards from the Alaska State Council on the Arts in 2016 and 2017.
• Sarah Mouracade was an honorable mention winner in the nonfiction public category in the 2017 Creative Writing Contest sponsored by the Anchorage Daily News.
• At least two students have been nominated for prestigious Pushcart Prizes based on published work in literary journals (one of them twice). 
• Three graduates have been awarded individual artist grants from the Rasmuson Foundation to complete a children’s opera, a novel, and a poetry manuscript.

Because we enjoy bragging, here's a partial list of places where our students have published their work:

Orion, The New York Times, The Citron Review, Vela, Chautauqua, The Southhampton Review, The Georgia Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Foreign Policy, Tar River Poetry, Brevity, Fourth River, The Journal for the Association of Literature and the Environment, War, Literature and the Arts, The Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, The Millions, The Normal School, Paste, Shadowbox, The Southeast Review, Fredericksburg Literary & Arts Review, Portland Magazine, Alpinist, Southern Indiana Review, METER magazine, Journal of Florida Literature, Woman Overboard, StorySouth, Literary Mama, terrain.org, The Laurel Review, Cirque, Glassworks Literary Magazine, Pilgrimage, Arctica,Flashquake, Vanishing Point, Two Review, Windmill, Cardiff Review, Hetq.am, Meter, Alaska Women Speak, Tidal Echoes, biostories, Nature Writing, Rock & Sling, River Styx magazine, Dupe, Permafrost, Camas: The Nature of the West, Down in the Dirt, International Poetry Review, F Magazine, Gargoyle, Philly Flash Inferno, Sundog Literary Review, 300 Days of Sun, Four Ties Lit Review, We’Moon, Faeirie Magazine, Flyover Country Review, Digital Americana, The Doctor TJ Eckleburg Review, S/tick, tropmag.com, Foliate Oak Literary Magazine, Twisted Vine Literary Arts Journal, Kestrel, Sukoon, The Caribbean Writer, La Voz de Esperanza, Mused, Dark Mountain, On the Rusk, Stoneboat Literary Review, The Yellow Medicine Review, Gris-Gris, The Illanot Review, Pine Hills Review, The Fiction Advocate, Sediment Literary Arts Journal, Pacific Review, and Sierra Nevada Review.

(That doesn't even include the anthologies.)

Undoubtedly we've missed people and publications in this overview. If so, please mention them in the comments! 

And here's to another decade of great writing by good people.