New Work Out from Many WLP Graduates

Emerson’s Writing, Literature and Publishing Department has announced a number of new alumni publications and performances

Novels

Jay Baron Nicorvo’s (MFA ’01) debut novel, The Standard Grand, is coming out from St. Martin’s Press in 2017. He has published a poetry collection, Deadbeat, and served as guest editor at Ploughshares and PEN America. His writing has appeared on Salon, in Poets & Writers and The Believer, and has been featured on NPR and PBS News Hour.  

Baron Nicorvo has taught at Western Michigan University, where he helps advise the literary journal, Third Coast.

Mori Ponsowy’s (MFA ’99) novel Abundancia has been translated into Croatian and was slated to be published later this year. Her third novel, Busco un amigo (Random House), and her second poetry collection, Cuánto tiempo un día (Ed. Brujas), were published in 2015.

Children/Young Adult

Steven Withrow, MA ’99 will publish his first children’s poetry collection, It’s Not My Fault, written with Roger Stevens, with Bloomsbury/A&C Black in August 2016. Withrow’s poems for kids have appeared in anthologies including The National Geographic Book of Nature Poetry (National Geographic, 2015) and One Minute Till Bedtime (Little, Brown, 2016). His speculative poem “The Sun Ships” was a nominee for the Rhysling Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association.

Winning, a young adult novel by Lara Zeises Deloza, MFA ’01, was released by HarperCollins in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook in June 2016. She has published six books for teens and one for tweens, You First (HarperCollins, 2015), under the pseudonym Lola Douglas. Deloza is the special projects and strategic initiatives manager at the International Literary Association.

Plays

Two plays written by David Valdes Greenwood, MFA ’94, have gone or will go into full production this year. Raggedy And was performed at the Rivendell Theatre in Chicago this past spring and at the Vermont Pride Theater Festival in July; Full Code will be performed this fall by the Boulder (Colorado) Theatre Company.

Valdes Greenwood’s The Mermaid Hour was featured in the 2016 NuVoices Festival at Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Vow Keepers had a staged reading at IATI Theatre in New York in the Cimientos Fellowship.

Poetry

Perception, the fourth book of poems by Christina Pugh, MFA ’00, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2017. The publication follows Pugh’s 2016 fellowship at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria, Italy, and her 2015–2016 Guggenheim fellowship in poetry. Pugh’s poems have appeared recently in The Atlantic, Parnassus, and Ploughshares, and she will be the featured poet in Fifth Wednesday for the Fall 2016 issue. Her essay “On Ghosts and the Overplus” appeared in Poetry in March and was feature on Poetry Daily.

Pugh was on the faculty of the Ocean State Summer Writing Conference at the University of Rhode Island in June. She is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is consulting editor for Poetry magazine.

Memoir

In 2017, Any One of Us, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s (MFA ’09) book of memoir and literary journalism, will be published by Macmillian imprint Flatiron Books, as well as publishers in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Taiwan. She recently completed a second fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and was a writer-in-residence at the Studios of Key West.