BU Creative Writing

Great news for Kimberly Elkins (2010): Kimberly was a teaching fellow this summer at both the Wesleyan Writers Conference and at the Sewanee Writers Conference. Also, her story "Boys with Wings" has just been published in Slice Magazine, in an issue featuring Rick Moody and Francine Prose. Kimberly recently read this story at a Slice event in New York.

Kimberly's debut novel, WHAT IS VISIBLE, will be published in June 2014 from Grand Central/Twelve. Twelve is a relatively new imprint of Hachette Book Group that releases no more than one "singular book" per month. A book trailer for WHAT IS VISIBLE will be featured on Amazon; we will post it here as soon as it's available.

Kimberly Elkins' fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Atlantic, The Iowa Review, The Chicago Tribune, Best New American Voices, Glamour and Slice, among others.  She was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in fiction, and fellowships include Harvard, Radcliffe and the Kerouac Project for WHAT IS VISIBLE. Kimberly teaches at BU and in the MFA program at The University of Hong Kong, and lives in Cambridge, MA.

Congratulations, Kimberly!

Caitlin Doyle (Poetry 2008) continues to garner accolades as an emerging poet. Her work has recently been the subject of an essay entitled “Doyle & The Ersatz Life,” written by the poet and critic Michelle Lewis. In her examination of Caitlin’s poetry, Lewis writes:

“Much has been made of her work with rhyme and wordplay, which she employs to heighten the ominousness of her subjects… But something more complex than wordplay is at work… Her true aim is something different, and serves a specific purpose: to examine the merits and dysfunctions of faux worlds (call them self-delusion, fantasy, or simply nothingness) that haunt and displace traditional realities… These mirror images bleed together, Escher-like and unsettling… Doyle is keenly attuned to the haunting counterparts to the authentic…” You can read the rest of the essay by clicking here.

Caitlin is currently in residence at the James Merrill House in Stonington, CT, where she will spend September on a fellowship as the Merrill House Writer-In-Residence. Her other recent literary honors include the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship through the 2013 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a finalist designation in the 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship competition. In addition, her poetry has been included in the just-released anthology and craft book The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop, edited by Diane Lockward. Caitlin has also been featured recently in The Irish Examiner with regard to her essay “Hungry Hills: Coming of Age as an Irish American Poet,” which was published originally in Cork Literary Review, Vol. 15.

You can visit Caitlin’s website at this link to read her detailed literary bio and to continue following her work. Congratulations, Caitlin!

Lisa Hiton (Poetry 2011)'s poem "Compression Wood" has been published in The Cortland Review. You can read the poem here as well as listen to Lisa read it aloud.

Congratulations, Lisa!

Lisa Hiton received her MFA in poetry from Boston University in 2011. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Linebreak, Indiana Review, Guernica and DMQ Review, among others. Her poem "Tuesday" was reprinted in the spring 2013 issue of 236 Magazine, BU's creative writing alumni journal.  She has received fellowships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the MU Writing Workshops in Thassos. She is a current nominee for the Pushcart Prize.

It's been a productive summer for Mimi Lipson (Fiction 2012). Her story "The Cloud of Unknowing" was published in the summer issue of BOMB; "Moscow 1968" appeared in the summer issue of Witness; and her story "Mothra" was published in the April issue of The Brooklyn Rail. Full-text versions of all three of those stories are available online; just follow the links!

Mimi also has a story published in the summer issue of Harvard Review and nonfiction forthcoming in The Chicagoan and a new print magazine from Pitchfork, both in the fall.

Mimi Lipson lives in Kingston, New York. As a Leslie Epstein Global Fellow in Fiction she traveled around the Mediterranean sea. Her first collection of stories is coming out in March 2014 from Yeti Publishing. She will be teaching this fall in BU's Metropolitan College.

Congratulations, Mimi!

We are pleased to announce that Dariel Suarez (Fiction 2012) has had two stories published recently. "Sweet Saltwater" appeared in Necessary Fiction, and "Beets" was published in The Baltimore Review. He is also a new fiction co-editor at Blood Lotus Journal and one of the founding editors of Middle Gray Magazine.

Dariel Suarez is a Cuban-born writer who came to the United States in 1997. He earned his M.F.A. in fiction at Boston University, where he was a Global Fellow. Dariel is a fiction co-editor at Blood Lotus Journal and a founding editor of Middle Gray Magazine. He has taught creative writing at Boston University and the Boston Arts Academy, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Dariel’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals and magazines, including Gargoyle, The Baltimore Review, Necessary Fiction, Collier’s Magazine, Versal, SmokeLong Quarterly, and the Florida Book Review, among others. His work has been reprinted in Tigertail, A Florida Annual: Florida Flash and other anthologies. He’s currently finishing a story collection set in Cuba, titled A Kind of Solitude, and he’s at work on a novel about a Cuban political prisoner, titled The Playwright’s House.

Congratulations, Dariel!