Omnium Gatherum: Alumni & Teaching Staff News

Marci Vogel’s first collection of poetry, At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody, won the inaugural Howling Bird Press Poetry Prize and was published in September, 2015. New poetry, translations, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Zócalo Public Square, Jacket2, Drunken Boat, The Critical Flame, Matter Monthly, InTranslation, and Lunch Ticket. She recently organized a public reading at the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook as part of a new campaign to bring poetry to California State Parks.

Carla Trujillo’s new novel Faith and Fat Chances, a PEN Finalist for Socially Engaged Fiction, was published by Curbstone Books/Northwestern U. Press. On December 19, Los Angeles Review of Books ran an extensive interview with her.

Mark Wisniewski’s third novel, Watch Me Go (Penguin Random House Putnam, January 2015), has been praised by Salman Rushdie, Ben Fountain, Daniel Woodrell, and Rebecca Makkai.

Judy Batalion’s debut, White Walls: A Memoir About Motherhood, Daughterhood, and the Mess in Between, was published by NAL/Penguin in January.

Susan Starbird launched Susan The Magazine with “The Intertidal Issue,” her addition to the rich cult literature of kayaking. She has continued to explore the postmodern art of fragments and lists. Her essay “Commuting in the Valley of Shadows” appeared in West Marin Review Vol. 6.

Olga Zilberbourg’s short story, “The Green Light of Dawn,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize by Epiphany Journal. Olga attended the Community of Writers thanks to the Carlisle Family Scholarship.

The Penguin paperback edition of Natalie Baszile’s novel Queen Sugar, was published in 2015. The book will soon to be adapted for televison by writer/director Ava DuVernay of “Selma” fame, and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for OWN, Oprah’s television network.

Frances Dinkelspiel’s nonfiction book Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, landed on the New York Times bestseller list in November.

Matt Sumell’s novel, Making Nice was published by Henry Holt & Company in 2015. He was featured on National Public Radio’s “Weekend Edition, Saturday.” The New York Times included Making Nice, in their “The Best Book Covers of 2015” list (cover designed by Gray318); and it was included in The Fiction Advocate’s The 10 Best Books of 2015 list among others.

Marian Palaia’s critically acclaimed debut novel, The Given World, published in April by Simon and Schuster has been longlisted for the PEN/Bingham first novel prize. Shorter works have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly and Joyland. 

Celeste León’s debut novel, Luck is Just the Beginning, is inspired by a true story just and was released by Floricanto Press. The book is available from Amazon and Floricanto Press, as well as Tahoe’s local book store, The Bookshelf.

Gwen Goodkin’s short story, “How to Hold it All In,” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Atticus Review.

Dasha Kelly’s novel, Almost Crimson, was published by Curbside Splendor Publishing in May, 2015. Slate Magazine Book Review named her in their “23 Best Lines from 2015” list. The line is from Almost Crimson: “She never wanted to forget this moment, this smell, these exact shades of sunshine, lemon, maize, construction hat, yolk, taxi, sunflower, bumblebee, mustard.”

Elisa Adler’s second book, Home Place, has just been released by Floating Island Publications. Parts of it were first read during an Art of the Wild workshop. A love story about a particular valley in the northern Sierra Nevada, Home Place tells the story of a place and the spirits that shape it.

William Petersen’s short story, “Satisfaction”, will appear in the Fall/Winter 2015 edition of Solstice.
(Available online in December.)

Linda González recently published personal essays in Huizache, La Tolteca ‘Zine, and raisingmothers.com.

Dorothy Rice’s first book, The Reluctant Artist: Joe Rice 1918 – 2011, has been published by Shanti Arts Publishing. The author’s father, Joe Rice, was an art teacher in the San Francisco public schools and a little-known artist in his own right. An art book/memoir, The Reluctant Artist includes over 70 full color illustrations of his paintings, ceramics and jewelry, work created over a forty-year period. The senior Rice eschewed any recognition for his art; his reticence and abiding humility inspired his daughter to write about him and to share his work more broadly.

Kathy Walters became a regular contributing columnist for the Nevada Appeal (a daily newspaper distributed from Reno to Gardnerville, NV).

Herta Feely’s novel, tentatively titled Saving Phoebe Murrow, has been accepted for publication by Upper Hand Press in the US and Twenty7 Books (an imprint of Bonnier Fiction UK) in the UK. It’s due out in September 2016.

The Sound of Murder, the second book in Cindy Brown’s Ivy Meadows theater mystery series, was published by Henery Press in October 2015. Macdeath, the first in the series, was published (also by Henery Press) in January 2015.

Mark Maynard is the recipient of the 2015 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Silver Pen Award. The award is presented “to recognize writers who are in mid-career and have already shown substantial achievement. The award is designed to honor their talent and encourage other emerging and mid-career writers.” The award will be presented at the University of Nevada, Reno on November 19th. Novelist Laura McBride will also be receiving a Silver Pen, and Ellen Hopkins will be inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame.

Nayomi Munaweera’s novel, Island of a Thousand Mirrors, was published by St. Martin’s Press in September 2014. Also, her op-ed piece, “The Real Enemy Is Fundamentalism and It Doesn’t Belong Exclusively to Islam,” was published in The Huffington Post in January, 2015.

Scott Allan Morrison’s debut novel, Terms of Use, will be released on Jan. 1, 2016 by Thomas & Mercer. For more information, please visit his website and blog.

Michael Golding’s novel, A Poet of the Invisible World, was published by Picador in October. Michael will be reading from his book at the Miami Book Fair International in late November and speaking at the Search for Meaning Book Festival in Seattle in February 2016.

Elizabeth Kadetsky’s novella, On the Island at the Center of the Center of the World, was published by Nouvella in 2015, and her short story collection, The Poison that Purifies You, by C&R Press in 2014. She has recent personal essays and short stories in New England Review, Antioch Review, and Glimmer Train. She is assistant professor of creative writing/English at Penn State, and she gave birth to her healthy and happy baby boy, Alexander, in June 2014.

Andrew Roe’s debut novel, The Miracle Girl, was published by Algonquin Books in April 2015.

Justin McFarr recently had two of his short stories published, one in Wild Quarterly, the other in The East Bay Review. Both can be read from the journals online.

Marian Palaia’s debut novel, The Given World, was published in April 2015 by Simon and Schuster. It is an Indie Next pick and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

The LaoGai Museum in Washington, D. C., has featured Diane Wolff on their website (laogai.org) in regards to her book, The Lamborghini and the LaoGai: The Two Faces of China’s Rise. She has also done a television interview with Radio Free Asia about a roadmap for Tibet’s future. They posted the interview on their website: www.rfa.org.

Maureen Duffy received a writing residency grant from the Vermont Studio Center for November 2015.

Stephanie Kegan’s novel, Golden State, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014, was named a “People’s Pick” by People Magazine, a “Must Read” by Entertainment Weekly, “Best in the West” by Los Angeles Magazine, and one of the 15 Best Fiction Books of 2015 (So Far) by Paste Magazine. Simon & Schuster published the paperback version of Golden State in 2015.

John Matthew Fox was a finalist for the 2015 Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, which comes with a $1000 prize and publication in the newspaper.

Laura Otis’s new academic book, Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Rethinking Thought compares creative people’s personal insights into their thinking with recent findings by cognitive neuroscientists. Otis has also started earning a low residency MFA in Fiction from Warren Wilson College.

Liz Brown’s nonfiction book, Twilight Man: The Strange Life and Times of Harrison Post, will be published by Viking in 2016.

Jonathan Cohen received the Excellence in Volunteerism Award from the Orange County Board of Supervisors in September, 2015 for his work with the adult literacy group READ/OC.

Sheila Webster Boneham’s poem, “Spin”, appears in 27 Views of Wilmington, released in October by Eno Publishers, Durham, NC.

Heather Young’s debut novel, The Lost Girls, which she workshopped during her week in Squaw Valley, will be published in summer 2016 by William Morrow/HarperCollins.

Charlene Caruso’s essay, “Burying Things,” appears in Issue 32 of 34th Parallel Magazine. She originally workshopped that piece at the Writers Workshop in 2014.

Ronald Alexander’s stories appeared in Shadowgraph Quarterly (Fall 2014) and Glitterwolf Magazine (Winter 2015). He is the author of the novels The War on Dogs in Venice Beach and Below 200, published by Hollyridge Press.

Marjorie’s short story, “The Gleaners,” was published by the Santa Fe Writers Workshop in Sept. of 2014. As a result of readers wanting to know what happened to the protagonist and her brother, she decided to expand it into a novel. Since the story continues in France, she applied for and received a Research Residency from the University of Chicago to work at their Center in Paris. She researched and conducted interviews in French for expanding and is now writing it while teaching classes at UC Irvine.

Renee Thompson’s short story, “Recovery,” appeared in Western Press Books’ 2015 Anthology Manifest West. Her story “Brilliance” appeared in Cactus Heart in June.

Gail Reitano’s memoir vignettes, “Growing Up (Italian) in the New Jersey Pine Barrens,” will appear in the
Fall 2015 anthology, Songs of Ourselves, America’s Interior Landscape, from Blue Heron Book Press

The Military Writers Society of America (MWSA) announced the award of the 2015 Gold Medal – Historical Fiction, to John J. Gobbell at their annual meeting September 26, 2015 in Phoenix, Arizona. The award was for his latest novel, Edge of Valor, published by the United States Naval Institute Press. Edge of Valor is the fifth novel in the Todd Ingram stand-alone series.

Leza Lowitz’s debut memoir, Here Comes the Sun, on finding motherhood across two oceans, two decades, and two thousand yoga poses, has been published by Stone Bridge Press of Berkeley, CA. Excerpts appeared in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, Shambhala Sun, Best Buddhist Writing 2011, Yoga Journal, Yoga Journal Japan, Wanderlust.com, Elephant Journal, and the Manifest-Station.

Erich launched Left Coast magazine. “Revealing our culture, improving our lives, advancing our secret agenda.”

Sommer Schafer’s short story, “A Final Affair,” was published in the inaugural issue of The 3288 Review.

Alex Wilson’s short story, “Fence,” appears in the Fall 2016 issue of the Southwest Review.

A. R. Taylor’s novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion, received the IPPY Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction 2015. One of her new short fiction stories was performed Wednesday, October 21st as part of Lit Crawl L. A.

Suzanne Berube Rorhus has short stories in the Flash and Bang anthology, out in October 2015, and in Memphis Noir, which will come out in November, 2015.

Gwen Goodkin had two short stories published in July – “One From Many” by Witness and “How to Hold it All in” published as part of Atticus Review’s Tales from the VFW series.

Stephanie Austin is a new monthly contributor at The Nervous Breakdown.

This summer Nina won the 2015 Beacon Street Prize for her essay “I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry.” It will be printed in the fall issue of Redivider. Her upcoming publications include “The Tuesday Evening Train,” which will appear in Volume 8 of The Los Angeles Review this fall, and “What I Know,” which will appear in the spring 2016 issue of Puerto del Sol.

Celeste’s León’s novel, Luck is Just the Beginning, will be released in November, 2015 by Floricanto Press. For more information and to read reviews by fellow Squaw Valley alumni and staff, please visit her website and blog.

Charlotte Reiter co-authored Taking Control of Your Seizures: Workbook, recently released by Oxford University Press in their Treatments That Work series.

Paulette Boudreaux’s debut novel, Mulberry, winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize, was released by Carolina Wren Press on October 1, 2015.

Jackie Davis Martin read her short story “In the Heat” at the book launch of the anthology, Love on the Road (Liberties Press), in Dublin, Ireland in 2015. Her short story “Knife” (one-on-one consultant, Michael Jaime Beccera) won first prize in fiction from New Millennium Writings and will be published in Fall, 2015. In 2015, other stories appeared in Thrice Publishing, 100 Word Story, Bethlehem Writers Group, Bluestockings Magazine, On the Premises, Infective Ink, Halfway Down the Stairs, and a poem in The Best American Poetry Show.

Sheila Webster Boneham’s essay, “A Question of Corvids”, appears in the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing anthology edited by Rebecca Skloot. In 2014, the essay won the Prime Number Magazine Creative Nonfiction Award judged by Ned Stuckey-French and appeared in the October 2014 issue of the magazine and in the 2014 Press53 Annual Anthology (Durham, NC: Press53, 2014).

Sheila Boneham is pleased to announce the release of Shepherd’s Crook, the fourth installment of her award-winning Animals in Focus mystery series from Midnight Ink.

Jan Stites’s novel, Reading the Sweet Oak, was published September 2015 by Lake Union Publishing, a full-service, mainstream novel imprint of Amazon (not self-publishing).

JJ Strong’s short story “People You’ve Been Before” will appear in the Fall 2015 issue of Fifth Wednesday. He also has two professional play productions upcoming: one in October at the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego and one in January 2016 at the LaBute New Theater Festival in New York.

Maureen O’Leary Wanket’s short stories appear in Gold Man Review, Issue 5, and Shade Mountain Press’ anthology The Female Complaint: Tales of Unruly Women, both released November 2015. She is the recipient of Heyday Books’ Sacramento Valley Writing Contest best-of-category prize in poetry, and her work will appear in a forthcoming book about the environment and people of the region.

Sandy Yang’s short story, “The Future Is,” was published in the Fall 2015 issue of South Dakota Review, and her story “The Desert Museum” was published in Juked in April 2015.

Julie Morin’s short story, “How To Disappear”, was published in March, 2015 in Pacifica Literary Review.

R.T. Jamison won UCLA’s James Kirkwood Literary Prize in Creative Writing in 2014. His winning story appears in the current issue (Autumn 2015) of the Bellevue Literary Review.

Lauri Maerov’s short story, “River”, appears in the Fall 2015 issue of The Raleigh Review.

Jacqueline Doyle was awarded a Notable Essay citation in Best American Essays 2015, ed. Ariel Levy for her essay “Who’s Your Stepdaddy?” in Jabberwock Review. This past year she also published creative nonfiction in Ghost Town, Under the Sun, Grist: The Online Companion, Lunch Ticket, Cold Mountain Review, Waccamaw, Switchback, and Southern Humanities Review (nominated for a Pushcart).

Dawn Dorland was named a Visiting Artist for six weeks this fall by the Regional Cultural Center in New York Mills, MN. Earlier this summer she regrettably had to decline a full scholarship to the Writers Workshops ’15 in order to have surgery: Dawn also became a living kidney donor this year.

Benito Vergara’s short story, “Stone, Well, Girl,” including an interview with the author, appeared in Issue Forty-Nine of SmokeLong Quarterly (September 2015).

Meg Waite Clayton’s fifth novel, The Race for Paris — the story of two female journalists hoping to be the first to report the liberation of Paris in the summer of 1944 — was published by HarperCollins in August, and is a national bestseller and an Indie Next pick, as well as recommended reading by Glamour and the BBC, and a Historical Novel Reviews Editors’ Choice. Meg also published seven opinion pieces in the past year, in the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and the San Jose Mercury News. 

Matthew Fogarty’s debut collection of short stories, Maybe Mermaids & Robots are Lonely, and a novella will be published in Fall 2016 by George Mason University’s Stillhouse Press.

Paula Priamos’s literary thriller, Inside V: A Novel, will be published by Rare Bird Books in 2016.

This year David Hagerty’s debut novel, They Tell Me You Are Wicked, a murder mystery, was published by Evolved Publishing. The first in a series of three, the next novels will appear in 2016 and 2017.

Terence Clarke’s novel, The Notorious Dream of Jesús Lázaro, was published by Astor & Lenox in 2015.

Melissa DeCarlo’s debut novel, The Art of Crash Landing, was published in 2015 by Harper Paperbacks/HarperCollins.

Leland Cheuk’s first novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong is will be published by CCLaP Publishing in November 2015.

Jonah C. Sirott’s debut novel, This is the Night will be published by Little A  in November.

Trent Pridemore: A feature article and photo essay will by published in the 2015 Holiday issue of Sierra Heritage Magazine where he has published other features.  He also writes feature articles and has the “Stillwater” (fly fishing lakes) column and the “Foraging Angler” (food, wine, travel and outdoor cooking) column for California Fly Fisher. The magazine has also run chapters from his memoir project, “Chasing Rainbows…Tales of a Well-Traveled Fly Fisherman.” Related work includes lecturing on fly fishing, conservation biology and as a Special Outreach Ambassador for Bear Yuba Land Trust. He recently signed a contract to lecture for International Sportsman’s Expositions.