Recent Awards and Achievements

Faculty Advisors

Ryan Boudinot’s novel Misconception was a finalist for the PEN/USA Literary Award. His novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife, sold to Grove/Atlantic, and is set for publication in 2012. His story, "The End of Ernie and Bert” appeared in Golden Handcuffs Review and his story "Chopsticks," appeared in Monkeybicycle. An interview Ryan conducted with Canadian film director Guy Maddin appears in the January 2011 issue of The Believer. He read at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House and University Bookstore.

 

A poetry collection by Beatrix Gates was published by Puerta Del Mar in Spain in 2010, translated by Jesus Aguado. The collection includes work from her last collection, Ten Minutes, and new work. She presented "The Poems of Vikram Babu" at Poet’s House in New York City.

 

Deborah Brevoort was a visiting guest artist at the Seattle Pacific University, where she gave a lecture in conjunction with their production of her play The Women of Lockerbie. The play had its Spanish premiere at the Teatre La Dependent in Alcoi, Spain (Valencia) and its Japanese premiere in Tokyo by Gekidan for You theatre company. Her play The Blue-Sky Boys, about NASA's Apollo engineers, opened at Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virginia. She was a Visiting Guest Playwright for the Centre Stage, South Carolina New Play Festival. Her play Signs of Life was read at the Black Ship Theatre in Chicago. Her Christmas oratorio King Island Christmas, was produced in Wasilla, Alaska; Yakima, Washington; Windsor, Nova Scotia; and Juneau, Alaska.

 

CBS4 ran a story on how the effect of weightlessness was achieved in a play by Rogelio Martinez. The Brandeis Univesity MFA program did a production of his play, Cocktail Time in Cuba. Asolo Rep in Sarasota, FL did a workshop of his play Fizz and Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts staged his play Wannamaker’s Pursuit, which received an Edgerton Foundation New American Play Award.

 

Bhanu Kapil read at Denver’s Dikeou Gallery as part of the first reading of the relaunched Dikeou Collection Reading Series. Her "forming book," Schizophrene, was accepted for publication by Nightboat Books. She also read at 21 Grand in Oakland, California; Mission College in Santa Clara; Subterranean Arthouse, in Berkeley; and the University of Chicago. Her work was set to appear in magazine Witness and in four new anthologies: “I’ll Drown My Book”: Conceptual Writing by Women, edited by Laynie Browne, Caroline Bergvall and Vanessa Place (Les Figues Press); HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians, edited by Sudeep Sen (HarperCollins India); Image + Text, edited by Lisa Pearson (Siglio Press); and Encyclopedia Project: Vol 2, edited by Tisa Bryant, Kate Schatz and Miranda Mellis (Encyclomedia).

 

Rebecca Brown's essay, “Failure: An Appreciation,” which originated as a Goddard commencement address, was published in The Stranger. Her collection of essays, American Romances, was listed as one of the three finalists for the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. She read at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House. She was a visiting writer at San Diego State University.

 

Susan Kim appeared on The View to talk about her book, Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation. She also appeared in a panel called "That Not-So-Fresh Feeling: Marketing Embarrassing Products to Women" at New York City’s Housing Works Bookstore. She celebrated the publication of her graphic novel, City of Spies, with a signing with her collaborators at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City. The second graphic novel she wrote with her boyfriend, Laurence Klavan, Brain Camp, was published by Macmillan/Roaring Brook Press. She participated in a graphic novels panel/"carousel" hosted by the New York Public Library and appeared at New York’s Comic Con.

 

Douglas Martin read at The Living Theatre and the KGB bar in New York. Some of his book art was shown as part of a two day-conference, "Spanking and Poetry," on the work and practice of his late professor, Eve Sedgwick. As part of "Tendencies: Poetics and Practice," he delivered a paper exploring "the relationship between contemporary poetic manifesto, practice, queer theory, and pedagogy." His book of stories, They Change the Subject (University of Wisconsin Press) was made available on Kindle. He contributed to a survey of "Best LGBT books of the year" at Band of Thebes and his most recent novel also made the list.

 

Richard Panek read as part of the "Writers Speak" series at Stony Brook University/SUNY in Southampton, NY. His article "Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe" appeared in the April issue of Smithsonian magazine. He joined The Last Word on Nothing, a blog for science writers. His next book was mentioned on Entertainment Weekly’s website. Two of his articles that originally appeared in Smithsonian, "The Year of Albert Einstein" and "The Biggest Mystery of Them All," have been republished in Mysteries of the Universe, a newsstand-only "Smithsonian Collector's Edition."

 

Kenny Fries read at the Access Living Arts and Culture Project in Chicago and gave a presentation at the Donnelly Family Disability Ethics Program Center at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. He led two writing workshops at University of Illinois at Chicago's Disability Art, Culture and Humanities Program in the Department of Disability and Human Development. His poem "In Snow" was chosen to be reprinted online by Site of the Big Shoulders in collaboration with Rhino, the literary magazine that originally published the poem in 1994. His work was considered in the context of the burgeoning field of "narrative medicine" in "Disability and narrative: new directions for medicine and the medical humanities," an article that appeared in the 2010 issue of Medical Humanities.

 

Kyle Bass' play Spoons was nominated for a SALT (Syracuse Area Live Theatre) Award for Best Original New Production. He was awarded the 2010 New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship in Playwriting. He co-wrote Cry for Peace: Voices from the Congo with internationally renowned theatre artist Ping Chong. Based on interviews with refugees from the genocide in the Congo, Cry for Peace was given workshop performances at Syracuse Stage.

 

Michael Klein was invited by Florida International University to talk and read to the graduate poetry and memoir writing classes who were reading his book The End of Being Known. The End of Being Known has been made available on Kindle. He also read to support his book then, we were still living at the Poetry Center at Smith College; in Provincetown, MA; Cambridge, MA; Brandeis University; City College; KGB Bar; and at Sebastian Junger's bistro The Half King. Two of his poems appeared in Post Road. He was interviewed on therumpus.net, which also reviewed and then, we were still living. His essays "Drinking Money" and "Image Results for the Sky" were accepted for publication by Fence. He had two poems appear at Lambda Literary.

 

Elena Georgiou read at the Social Justice Center in Albany, NY, as part of the Yes Reading Series. The reading was a collaborative project (with Goddard alum Christian Peet) tentatively titled, “I/mprovised E/xplorative D/evice.”

 

NAL announced that it would reissue Jeanne Mackin’s Louisa May Alcott mysteries beginning in June 2011. Her article "Speaking with the Dead: The Fox Sisters" was selected to be published in the 10th anniversary edition of New York Archives Magazine, SUNY Press.

 

Darrah Cloud collaborated with Cincinnati Playhouse, who commissioned her to write a play for children and awarded her the Macy's New Play Award. Ohio State completed a run of O Pioneers!, which Darrah wrote with her collaborator, composer Kim D. Sherman.

 

Rachel Pollock’s story “Forever” was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction. Parabola, the premier magazine of myth and spirituality, published her article "Death And Its Afterlives In The Tarot."

 

Nicola Morris read at the Aldrich Public Library in Barre, Vermont as a member of Acme Poets, and at Buffalo Books in Ithaca, New York, as part of a "Works in Progress" reading series.

 

Neil Landau celebrated the publication of his book 101 Things I Learned in Film School, which he promoted with a West Coast tour of LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, and Denver and on the East Coast in Boston and New York. His Goddard Port Townsend Commencement address was published in Written By, the magazine of the Writers' Guild of America. He was the “Power Author” featured in the summer issue of L.A. Confidential magazine. The 3-D animated movie he wrote, The Adventures of Tadeo Jones, went into production and will be released in 2012. Neil was a guest on the radio show West Coast Live.

 

Paul Selig just returned from book tour for his new book I Am the Word: A Guide to the Consciousness of Man's Self in a Transitioning Time (Tarcher/Penguin).

 

Reiko Rizzuto read in New York to launch Hiroshima in the Morning, which won the Grub Street National Book Prize. She also read at Elliott Bay Book Company and Kinokuniya Bookstore in Seattle, Green Arcade Books in San Francisco, A Great Place for Books in Oakland, at the Missoula Festival of the Book, Tattered Cover in Denver, and the Asia Society Lunch Series in New York. Hiroshima in the Morning was featured as an "Indie Sleeper" in Publishers Weekly. Her essay, “Homeless in a Foreign Land,” appeared on Quest for Kindness.

 

Aimee Liu presented at the UCLA Extension Writers Faire in Los Angeles. Her story “The Repairman,” appeared in Good Housekeeping. She led a panel discussion, “Finding and Working with a Literary Agent” for the UCLA Extension Writers Program in Los Angeles.

 

Jan Clausen read her work in a poetry celebration marking the opening of the CLAGS Fall Conference, “In Amerika They Call Us Dykes: Lesbian Lives in the 1970’s.” She had a guest essay on Goddard graduate Cara Hoffman’s blog.

 

Jane Wohl had a review of the poetry collection “Rest in Black Haw” published in First Draft Reviews.

Current Students

Renee Rankin play Zap Belly was included in the lineup of The Queens Players’ annual January festival of one-act plays. A version of Zap Belly was selected as a semi-finalist in the Knock International Play Contest in Seattle. Crawlin' with Roaches, another 10-minute play, was selected for the TestoGenius Festival at Manhattan Theatre Source. Both plays were developed at Goddard residencies.

 

Debbie Staley was contracted for three more books in her Angel Ridge Series, published by Bell Bridge Publishing. The third book in the Angel Ridge series became available through online retailers, on Kindle, and at the iBookstore. Thorndike purchased large print rights to her What the Heart Wants. She was featured on NBC Knoxville.

 

One of Jessica Otto’s poems was published in The Camel Saloon's Jack Kerouac tribute issue. Another poem was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 

Maggie Cleaveland’s poem "Unlucky," originally published in Out of Our last spring, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

In an article published in Poets & Writers magazine, Jill Magi, who is also a member of the Goddard undergraduate faculty, was named one of the “Fifty Most Inspiring Authors in the World.” Portions of her text/embroideries series called "Objects & Didactics" was published on the Elective Affinities anthology site.

 

Cydne Watterson’s essay “Imagining Heaven” was accepted for an anthology.

 

Paul Calandrino’s play I Hear America Barking was one of three plays selected for the Portland Playwrights Project (an initiative of Bump in the Road Theatre).

 

Kristen E. Nelson’s interview with Shelly Taylor, author of Black-Eyed Heifer (Tarpaulin Sky Press) appeared in Trickhouse Vol 8. Her text/image collaboration with Noah Saterstrom, "Ghosty" appeared in Drunken Boat issue #12.

 

The film of Gary Betsworth's screenplay, Friends Like These, won Grand Prize at the Georgetown Horror Festival. Gary also played Frank Olson on the Discovery Channel’s Dr. G's Most Shocking Cases: Conspiracy Theory.

 

Karen Hugg’s essay "The Dom Dziecka," was published in the 2010 "Toys" issue of Specs Journal.

 

Four of Yasmin Amico’s poems were published in The Tapestry. Post University, CT presented her with a "Certificate of Appreciation" for mentoring young women.

 

George Chappell's poems, "Spirit of the Moores," and "Moose on the Road to Jackman," were published in the Bangor Daily News.

 

Theresa Dowell published two new poetry e-chapbooks, Danaus Plexippus Plexippus and Cartography of Family. Her poem “Photosynthesis” was published online in Issue 3 of EarthSpeak Magazine. Her book of poetry, Vietnam & Beyond, with photography by Yves Schiepek, was published, with proceeds going directly to the East Meets West Foundation: Life is Beautiful Campaign benefiting children with disabilities from Vietnam including those affected by Agent Orange.

 

Susana Cook’s plays "Dykenstein" and "Spic for Export" were published in the anthology Argentinean Playwrights Living Abroad by the National Institute of Theater in Buenos Aires. She was invited to perform a dramatic monologue at the Conference States of Devotion: Religion, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Body in the Americas at New York University.

 

Kristen Stone’s poem "Dear corporate bookstore chain" appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly. She also had a poem featured on the online journal amphibi.us.

 

Kyle Aldrich and Phil Duncan recently participated in the world's largest film competition--the international 48 Hour Film Project-- where they wrote a digital short film for one of Portland, Oregon's 56 teams.

 

Mary Curtis’s story "Going Back" was published in Crab Orchard Review. One of her annotations was published on therumpus.net. Her poem "You Made Me A Slave to Silver" was published in the winter issue of the Boston Literary Magazine.

 

Tammi Spruill’s short story, "Paper Wings," was published in The Medulla Review.

 

Jon Dittman’s critical essay, “knowledge2 + certainty2 = squat2’: (re)Thinking Identity and Meaning in Percival Everett’s The Water Cure” was slated to be published by the University of Mississippi Press in Critical Perspectives on Percival Everett.

 

Angi Baker’s short story "The Bee Keeper" was published with 3:AM Magazine. Opium Magazine's site published her story “The Moths.” An essay about spinning yarn and memories of one woman from Pakistan appeared in Spin*Off (Interweave Press). Another essay was accepted for publication by Grit magazine.

Alumni

Cara Hoffman’s So Much Pretty, her Goddard thesis, was slated for publication by Simon and Schuster, who also bought the rights to her novel Snow in Hebron.

 

Ann Keeling performed at readings in Grass Valley, California and at the Nevada County Women's Writing Salon.

 

Matthew Quick’s The Silver Lining Playbook was selected by Amanda Ross for The TV Book Club (UK), which the Telegraph calls “Britain’s most powerful book club.”

 

Donelle McGee’s novella, Shine, was published in the anthology Men To Men: New Voices In Gay Fiction. Donelle’s "The Color of Kindness (for Bhanu Kapil)” appeared on Quest for Kindness.

 

Sybil St. Claire was commissioned by Tony-nominated Broadway and film producer John Pinckard to co-write the screenplay Maam's Crossing.

 

Marcia Casey’s long critical paper was published by Jacket Magazine in April.

 

Drew Dillhunt’s Materials Science was a finalist for the National Poetry Series 2009 Open

Competition. His poem "Numerology" was published in the January/February issue of the online journal Eclectica.

 

Michelle Embree’s thesis play, Fish In A Barrel, made the "Final Round" at the playwrights workshop at the Kennedy Center.

 

Cara Benson’s book of poetry, (made), was published by Book Thug.

 

Kristin Petersen Schoonover had work accepted in Death Head Grin. Her story “Smoke Brake” appeared in Issue 16 of The Legendary. A flash fiction piece, "Shell Game," appeared in Eclectic Flash.

 

Theresa Edwards had an essay in delirious hem. Her poem "After Surgery" appeared online at Pirene's Fountain. Her collaboration with alum Lori Schreiner honoring some of the children who were victims of the Holocaust was featured online at Trickhouse. Her "The Touch of the Notch" was published online and in print in Touch: The Journal of Healing. Her book Voices Through Skin was accepted for publication by Sibling Rivalry Press.

 

Two of Danny Pelletier’s stories, "Sheldon and Michelle Can't Stop Touching Each Other" and "Sheila is trying to be unhealthy" were accepted for publication in Pear Noir! 4.

 

Mwalim won the New England Urban Music Best Male Vocalist Award.

 

Cathy Kirkwood celebrated the release of her first novel (and Goddard thesis) Cut Away (Arktoi/Red Hen Books), with a reading at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, with Goddard faculty Rebecca Brown reading as well.

 

Carolyn Nur Wistrand received a $15,600.00 grant from the Research and Creative Activities Dept at the University of Michigan-Flint, where she is on the faculty in The Dept. of Africana Studies, to conduct field study and write a historical drama dramatizing the first attempts at education for newly freed slaves on the Sea Islands of South Carolina during the Civil War. The play, Rising, received a staged reading by the Negro Ensemble Company, Inc. in New York City in April of 2010 and was included in the Midtown International Theatre Festival in New York City along with her play, Magdalena's Crossing. Another play, The Gambler's Earrings was one of six Finalists in the Echo Theatre's National Women's Playwriting Contest, and received a staged reading by Echo Theatre in Dallas, Texas.

 

Julie Greene’s This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness was accepted for publication by Chipmunka Publishing.

 

Kali Meister's thesis play After Autumn was chosen as one of the seven plays to be read in this year’s Appalachian Festival of Plays and Playwrights at Barter Theatre in Abingdon, Virgina.

 

Chris Millis wrote material for Rob Schneider, who performed it on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.

 

John Schimmel was named Senior Writer/Executive Editor for a new organization called SplashLife.

 

Susan Tsui’s short story "Baby, Be Mine" came out in the Warrior Wise Woman 3 anthology.

 

Maria Williams-Russell’s A Love Letter to Say There Is No Love was published by FutureCycle Press.

 

Gary Jacob’s book Still Life with Genitals appeared in paperback and as an e-book.

 

The third edition of Sheila Curran Bernard’s Documentary Storytelling: Creative Nonfiction on Screen, was published by Focal Press/Elsevier. Among the updates are interviews with filmmakers Alex Gibney, Deborah Scranton, James Marsh, and Goddard faculty member Susan Kim.

 

Anji Reyner’s poetry and fiction appeared in Action Yes, Front Porch, No Tell Motel, and Pear Noir.

Main Street Rag Publishing Company published Carolyn Bardos’s Yesterday’s Daybreak as part of the MSR Editor’s Choice Chapbook Series.

 

Bill Meis signed a contract to co-write a memoir with the well-known LA liberal/left philanthropist and political activist, Stanley K. Sheinbaum.

 

Craig Thornton was commissioned to create a docudrama with Indian River High School Department of Drama.

 

Wallace Wilhoit’s opera Stillwaters was read at the Actor's Guild of America in New York City.

 

Lawrence Goodman was selected by the Huntington Theater in Boston to be a fellow.

 

Pria Keefe curated the Words' Worth poetry readings at Seattle City Council, in which the Housing, Human Services, Health, and Culture committee meetings, chaired by Nick Licata, begin with a poem. A piece from her thesis was published in Switched-on Gutenberg.

 

Mona de Vestel signed a book contract with Standing Stone Books for her memoir Our Father.

 

Sidney Williams’s The Dusk Society, a graphic novel for young adults, is set for release in 2011.