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RC Creative Writing alumna and RC creative writing head Laura Thomas reads a new story, “Underlying Conditions,” as part of the second season of the Ferndale Library Podcast, “A Little Too Quiet,” which focuses on local authors.

Laura’s fiction collection, States of Motion, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2017. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, Witness, Midwestern Gothic, and other literary journals.

The November 16th issue of The University Record features an article about RC creative writing lecturer Susan Rosegrant.  Susan earned her bachelor’s degree in Chinese language and literature from the RC in 1976, and a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University in 1978. After more than 30 years in Boston, she returned to Ann Arbor in 2007 and began teaching writing at the RC.

Susan also heads the RC’s First-Year Seminar Program. A life-long birder, she has spotted more than 400 North American birds.

The article about Susan was written by RC creative writing student Kennedi Killips, who is currently doing an honors thesis with Sarah Messer as well as being an editorial assistant at the Record. Fillips is also a Hopwood Award winner.

The RC’s Sarah Messer, poet and nonfiction writer, will appear on the Clements’ Library panel, “The Clements Bookworm: Writing and Publishing Inspired by Genealogical Research,” on Friday, November 20th at 10 am.  Other panelists include Wendy Chapin Ford and Kay Miller.

Sarah is the author of four books: a hybrid history/memoir, Red House (Viking), a book of translations, Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (University of Michigan Press) and two poetry books, Bandit Letters (New Issues), and Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among others. For many years she taught as an Associate Professor in the MFA/BFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. In 2010, Messer co-founded One Pause Poetry, an on-line audio archive and reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Aside from her work at the RC, she teaches for the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown’s on-line writing program, 24 Pearl Street, and is a cheese maker at White Lotus Farms. She is a U-M alum, and a Hopwood Award winner.

Carmen Bugan (RC 1996) shares several recent talks and posts:

On Vimeo, she reads the poem “Visiting The Country Of My Birth,” commended in the 2010 National Poetry Competition, plus a more recent poem as part of the “Then and Now” series.

From the “Cold War Conversations” site, she describes “a childhood under the eye of the secret police.” In 1983, when she was 12, she returned from school in Bucharest to find secret police in her living room.

From the University of Oxford’s Oxford Centre for Writing, Carmen discusses working with Cold War surveillance family archives to better understand Cold War surveillance of her mother, who was under arrest in the infectious ward of a children’s hospital. She says she “found myself asking deeper questions about what constitutes literary language.”

Carmen was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. After U-M she earned an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD (English Literature) from Oxford University, UK. Her poetry collections include Crossing the Carpathians (2004), The House of Straw (2014), Releasing the Porcelain Birds (2016) and Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems (2019). She has also published a memoir, Burying the Typewriter (2012), and Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (2013).A book of essays, Poetry and the Language of Oppression, will be published in March 2021 by Oxford University Press. She teaches at the Gotham Writers Workshop in NYC and lives in Long Island.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

RC Creative Writing alumna Anna Clark (2003) published an essay, “Michigan’s failures should inform a new national urban agenda,” in Crain’s Forum, in the October 25th issue of Crain’s Detroit Business.

Anna is a journalist, and has lived in Detroit since 2007. She is the author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy (Picador, 2019), which won the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism and the Rachel Carson Environment Book Award.Her writing has appeared in New York Times, the Washington Post, Elle, the New Republic, Politico, the Columbia Journalism Review, the Boston Review, and Next City. She edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and is a contributing editor at Waxwing Literary Journal.  She has been a Fulbright fellow in Nairobi, Kenya, and she was a 2017 Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at U-M. More about Anna at her website.

John L. Hagen (RC 1972 Literature) has a story, “Chelsea’s Rescue,”  in Again, Hazardous Imaginings: More Politically Incorrect Science Fiction, due out this December from MonstraCity Press.  The book is a companion volume to Hazardous Imaginings: The Mondo Book of Politically Incorrect Science Fiction (October 2020), and includes fourteen stories by Ian Creasey, Andrew Fox, David Wesley Hill, Liam Hogan, Claude Lalumière, and others. More information at Amazon.

John retired in 2015 after a career in economic development. He and his wife Joy divide their time between homes near Tampa Bay and Saugatuck, Michigan. They celebrated their  45^th wedding anniversary earlier this month.

 

 

 

Damian Rogers (RC 1993 Creative Writing and Literature), published An Alphabet for Joanna: A Portrait of My Mother in 26 Fragments (Penguin Random House, September 2020), a memoir about being raised by a loving but erratic single mother who is today diagnosed with a rare form of frontal-lobe dementia.

Damian has also published two books of poetry: Dear Leader (Coach House Books, 2015), which was nominated for the Trillium Poetry Prize; and Paper Radio (ECW Press, 2009),  which was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award as well as the ReLit Award. Damian has taught creative writing at Ryerson University in Toronto and continues to teach private workshops. She is on and off social media @dam.rogers.

 

RC creative writing alumna Megan Cummins (2009) is featured in the November-December issue of Poets & Writers. Megan’s short story collection, If The Body Allows It, was published in September by the University of Nebraska Press, and was awarded the 2019 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Megan’s writing has appeared in CRAFT, Guernica, A Public Space, Hobart, One Teen Story, Ninth Letter, among other places. She has an MFA from Rutgers-Newark and an MA from UC Davis. She is managing editor of A Public Space and serves on the governing board of the The Bare Life Review. She lives in Brooklyn. Read more about Megan on her website.

 

 

 

Lynne Bekdash (BA 2020, Creative Writing and Literature; BBA 2020, Business Administration) has won the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem, “Immigrant Daughter Ghazal.” Lynne would like to thank “my amazing thesis advisor, Sarah Messer, my second reader, Laura Kasischke, and A. Van Jordan, who taught me how to write ghazals—in fact, I first wrote this poem for his class!” Lynne also wants to thanks Laura Thomas, the creative writing program, and Rebecca Manery from the Hopwood Program.”