Nana K. Twumasi (MFA Writing 2004) was born in the South and raised a bunch of other places, which left her with a Midwestern work ethic, an East Coast attitude and, now that she lives in Oakland, California, a West Coast sense of time. Her work has appeared as part of Ballyhoo Stories' 50 States Project and the International Museum of Women's Imagining Ourselves online exhibit. She is the coeditor of Monday Night, a journal of new literature.
Read the restPosted on Thursday, September 1, 2011 by Jim Norrena
About Melanie Westerberg
Melanie Westerberg (2004) is the author of City in the River, City in the Forest (Hag's Head Press, 2010). Her short stories have appeared in Mid-American Review, Third Coast, Torpedo, and the Best New American Voices 2006 anthology, and two were nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
Faculty Inspiration
Her collaboration with CCA MFA Writing faculty member Rebekah Bloyd was translated into Czech for RozRazil.
Read the restPosted on Thursday, September 1, 2011 by Jim Norrena
About Brent Foster Jones (2008)
In 2008 Southern Exposure asked me to read new prose and poetry as part of guerrilla broadcaster Neighborhood Public Radio's upcoming programming for the Whitney Biennial. My disembodied voice, along with others, was played for digital, radio, and museum listeners.
The experience started me thinking about how to keep new literature knit into our fast-moving world. Readers might be distracted, but they still want stories, but maybe these stories are lean, urgent things, elegant and efficient.
Training in Multiple Genres
Read the restPosted on Thursday, September 1, 2011 by Jim Norrena
Nikki Thompson is a poet, book artist (aka Deconstructed Artichoke Press), and happily failed architect. She fled Southern California for UC Berkeley, where she earned a degree in architecture and edited Berkeley Fiction Review.
In 2001 she was awarded the All College Honors in Graduate Writing from CCA. She remained in the Bay Area and completed the MFA Program in Writing in 2002.
Read the restPosted on Thursday, September 1, 2011 by Jim Norrena
Peach Friedman (2006) is the author of Diary of an Exercise Addict, a memoir recounting her rapid descent into and recovery from anorexia nervosa. The book received international acclaim from sources including the London Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, and Friedman was interviewed by Barbara Walters on The View, and on Oprah's Radio Network. People magazine gave the book three stars and named Friedman a "sexual adventuress," who inspires her readers.
Friedman resides in Auburn, Alabama, with her husband and two children.
Read the restPosted on Tuesday, August 30, 2011 by Chris Bliss
For additional information about CCA's 2011-12 faculty hiring, read the latest Academic Newsletter by Provost Mark Breitenberg.
New Full-Time Faculty
Read the restPosted on Monday, August 22, 2011 by Jim Norrena
CCA's MFA Program in Writing will celebrate its 10th anniversary this September. It seems the entire community of writers here at the college is looking backward as much as forward.
This is especially true for playwright and MFA Writing faculty member Claire Chafee, whose critically praised play Why We Have a Body (Bay Area premiere 1993) launched the Magic Theatre's 2011-12 season on Tuesday, September 6, at Fort Mason in San Francisco. The play, directed by Katie Pearl, and which runs through October 2, is part of a "revival effort" the theater is undertaking to include a previously produced hit play in each of its upcoming seasons.
Watch an interview of Chafee discussing Why We Have a Body with director Katie Pearl
Read the restPosted on Tuesday, August 16, 2011 by Jim Norrena
As the 10th Anniversary Reunion Weekend approaches, what better way to celebrate than to participate in a community book/CD swap?
Please arrive with a book/CD you’ve authored or illustrated (or both), a journal to which you’ve contributed, a zine you’ve edited—you get the picture.
When you arrive at the Writers' Studio on our celebration weekend (September 16-18), deliver the book/CD you are willing to swap to the "book swap" tables. We’ll have separate tables for faculty and alumni. Bid your book a fond farewell!
Read the restPosted on Wednesday, August 3, 2011 by Jim Norrena
Author: Gloria Frym
Publisher: BlazeVOX Books Buy now!
Publication date: 5/3/2011
ISBN: 9781609640422
Price: $16
How does the present imprint itself on language, on poetry? Gloria Frym's Mind Over Matter shows us that: the outlines of the endless wars, the credit default swaps. But it also shows poetry resisting this. "No poem/would stand for such a line," Frym writes. "A poem is not a fool." This book makes me want to cheer.
— Rae Armantrout
Read the restPosted on Wednesday, June 1, 2011 by Lindsey Westbrook
Saint Erasure
Talisman House, 2010
Paperback, 71 pages, $13.95
Laura Mullen says, "Anyone who still wants to view experimentation as a purely intellectual exercise will be convinced otherwise by Donna de la Perrière's exquisite second collection. Under the threat or promise of erasure and at the edge of silence, the poet deftly leads us through a shifting, minimalist landscape. Wrestling with change and stasis, with the resistance and sudden give of the real, she delicately monitors each stage of what feels like a pilgrimage, while defamiliarization pressures vision and makes each breath at once artful and endlessly brave. Saint Erasure saves us by exposing the beauty of our vulnerability: 'Welcome to the new body / tonight we lose everything.'" Donna de la Perrière is a faculty member in the MFA Program in Writing and the undergraduate Writing and Literature Program.
Read the rest