BU Creative Writing

We are excited to report that Damask Press is publishing a chapbook by Sophie Summertown Grimes (Poetry 2011). The chapbook, titled “City Structures,” will be released in late spring or early summer, with a release party and reading to be held in Chicago.

Damask writes that “Sophie’s poems begin with crossings — spatial, linguistic, intellectual — and travel the tangles.”

Sophie Summertown Grimes has lived and traveled in China as an Oberlin Shansi Fellow, and as a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow. You can read about her travels as a Global Fellow here. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College and graduated from our MFA program in 2011. Her poems have appeared in AGNIonline, 491 Magazine, CRATE, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Second runner-up for the 2011 New Letters Prize for Poetry, she lives and works in Chicago, where she is completing her first full book of poems. She writes poetry reviews for Publishers Weekly and freelance Chicago-centric web content, and she contributes to Chicago’s own experimental journal and blog, ANOBIUM.

Congratulations, Sophie!

More lovely poems from Katherine Hollander (Poetry 2006)–three of which you can read online! We’re proud to report that some of the work that she did as part of BU Creative Writing’s annual painter/poet project has been published in The Common Online. The project pairs BU poets with BU painters so that they may create collaborative work. The painter with whom Katherine collaborated was Alla Lazebnik (BU MFA 2012).

Also, Katherine’s poem “Der Anfang” has been published in Literary Imagination.

Her poem “The Apartment” was published in Hunger Mountain.

And finally, Sugar House Review has chosen Katherine’s “Poem” –originally published in SHR in summer 2012–as the first to be read and heard online in their new series “The Sound of Sugar.” (Visit the website to hear “Poem” in Katherine’s own voice.)

Katherine Hollander has published poems in Slate, Literary Imagination, Hunger Mountain, and elsewhere. She is a PhD candidate in modern European history at Boston University.

Congratulations, Katherine!

Patricia Park (Fiction 2009) has just had an op-ed published in The Guardian–on the front page! Her article addresses some of the themes she’s exploring in her novel-in-progress: white collar vs blue collar work, and the stigmas attached to the latter. Click here to read “The case for blue-collar work: College no longer guarantees success.”

Patricia Park lives in New York City and Boston. She blogs at koreanbodega.com.

Congratulations, Patricia!

Jim Gavin (Fiction 2011)’s collection of short stories, Middle Men, was released yesterday by Simon & Schuster. On Friday, Jim gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times about the mix of fact and fiction in Middle Men. To read the interview, click here.

Jim Gavin’s fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Zoetrope, Esquire, Slice, The Mississippi Review, and ZYZZYVA. He lives in Los Angeles.

Emma Duffy-Comparone (Fiction 2012)’s short story “The Zen Thing” is featured in the current issue of One Story. You can read an excerpt from the story and a Q&A with the author here and subscribe to the magazine (“one great short story in the mail every three weeks”) here.

Emma also has stories forthcoming in The American Scholar (Spring 2013) and The Southern Review (Summer 2014).  She has taught EN 305, Advanced Fiction Writing, to undergraduates at BU, and she currently teaches fiction at Champlain College in Vermont.

Congratulations, Emma!