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MFA Alumni | MA Alumni
Below is a sampling of accomplishments of recent graduates of our MFA and MA degree programs. If you are a graduate of one of our programs, please do let us know about your professional accomplishments by sending an email to Stephanie Young at syoung@mills.edu.
Robyn Brooks, Poetry MFA ’07 recently performed at the 2007 San Francisco Gay Pride festival, on the Soul Pride Stage, along with luminaries Sistahs In The Pit, Blue Buddha, Deep Dick Collective, Micia Mosley, Butta Babies, Ruff Tuff drag king talent, SMAAC and the Uptown Youth Group, Qui, Ricoshade and Dream Dance. Robyn also read recently for the new anthology What I Want From You: Voices of East Bay Lesbian Poets, published by RAW ArT PRESS.
Sara Campos, Prose MFA ’07 recently had an article published in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Carolina De Robertis, Prose MFA ’07 is the recipient of a 2008 Hedgebrook Residency for Women Authoring Change. An excerpt of her novel, The Invisible Mountain, appeared in the Fall, 2007 issue of ColorLines Magazine, and her translation, from the Spanish, of the essay "Trans," about Peruvian transgender folks, was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review's special Fall 2007 edition, "South American in the Twenty-First Century." Carolina's translation, from the Spanish, of Alejandro Zambra's contemporary Chilean novella Bonsai, is forthcoming in 2008 from Melville Publishing House. She also had an essay included in the new collection Abortion Under Attack: Women on the Challenges Facing Choice, edited by Krista Jacob and published by Seal Press.
Lara Durback, Poetry MFA '07 is the new studio manager for the Book Art Program at Mills College and recently gave a reading at New Yipes.
Liz Green, Poetry MFA ’07 recently performed at the Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco with her ensemble, Queer Identified Objects. The group performed an original piece blending “spoken word, silliness, queer politics and movement.”
April Kilcrease, Whitney Phaneuf, and Stephanie Pullen, Prose MFAs ‘07 read together at the first Rebel Reading Series in June, sponsored by Noise Pop and also featuring bay area music writers Dan Strachota and Chris Baty.
M. Mara Ann, Poetry MFA ’07 organized a multimedia performance, Containment Scenario: The Global Environmental Crisis, which featured work by many current and former MFA students.
Jen Nellis, Poetry MFA ’07 has curated and performed in movie telling/neo-benshi performances at CounterPulse in San Francisco. Jen has performed with fellow Mills alums Dennis Somera and Stephanie Young along with local writers and filmmakers David Brazil, Amanda Davidson, and Konrad Steiner. Jen has performed her movie-telling pieces at several performances spaces in the last year, including Artists Television Access and Small Press Traffic’s 2007 Poets Theater Festival.
Sarah Ostendorf, Prose MFA ’07 is pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Stephanie Brown, Prose MFA ’06 had a grant proposal approved by the Los Angeles Clippers Basketball Foundation. The grant will help to fund the Monterey Park Bruggemeyer Library’s Literacy, Food, & Fitness program.
Loretta Clodfelter, English BA ’00, Poetry MFA ‘06 is founder and managing editor of the new quarterly online journal THERE, which seeks to collect innovative or avant-garde works of poetry with a focus on issues of land use, the environment, development, politics and people, facts and fictions, and ambiguity and ambivalence, along with essays on the intersection between activism and poetics.
Laura Davis, Prose MFA ’06 and Carly West, Prose MFA ’06 recently wrote and produced a spoken word performance as part of the ReGeneration Art Show, which explored Genesis through a variety of visual media.
Laleh Khadivi, Prose MFA '06 is currently the 2007-2009 Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction at Emory University in Atlanta. Her first novel, The Age of Orphans, will be published by Houghton Mifflin in Spring, 2009 as part of a two-book deal. Italian rights to the novel, the first in a planned trilogy about the Kurds, have also been sold.
Nina LaCour, Prose MFA ’06 recently sold her debut young adult novel, Hold Still, about a girl's year of recovery and self-discovery in the wake of her best friend's suicide and the journal she left behind, to Dutton, a young readers division of Penguin.
Teresa Miller, Poetry MFA ’06 moved back to Seattle and is the education coordinator/tutoring center director for the Youth Tutoring Program at New Holly public housing community. The program serves students in grades 1–12 who live in Seattle's five public housing communities, the vast majority of who come from recent immigrant or refugee families.
J.D. Mitchell, Poetry MFA ’06 is co-editor and founder, with Chad Lietz, of the new journal Cricket Online Review. Recent issues feature work from Mills alumni Jeremy Thompson, Teresa Miller, Jen Dearinger, Sarah Trott, Dan Fisher, Dillon Westbrook, and David Horton, along with writing from Charles Bernstein, kari edwards, Amy King, Noah Eli Gordon, and others.
Elena Shapiro, Prose MFA '06 is pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Davis.
Aimee Suzara, Poetry MFA ‘06 continues to perform widely as an individual and member of several performance collectives across the Bay Area. Her current multidisciplinary work in progress, Pagbabalik (Return), had its world premiere in full production at La Peña Cultural Center in June 2007. This work also received a Zellerbach Community Arts Grant, was selected for CounterPulse’s 2006 Emerging Performance Festival, and excerpts have been staged or given staged readings at APAture, Intersection for the Arts, and Bindlestiff Studios.
Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Poetry MFA ’06 Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen, Poetry MFA '06 has been published in the Asian Pacific American Journal, There Journal, Nha Magazine, the Vietnamese Artists Collective anthology AS IS: A Collection of Visual and Literary Works by Vietnamese American Artists and the Asian American Women Artists Association (AAWAA) anthology Cheers to Muses: Contemporary Works by Asian American Women. Anh-Hoa has performed her work at Kearny Street Workshop's APAture 8 & 9, San Francisco's Litcrawl and Writers with Drinks. She is also the founder of Pomelo Press, and creates self-published and hand bound artists books. Her artists books and photography series "Of the Body" have been shown in various galleries in the Bay Area. Anh-Hoa has also completed a residency at Hedgebrook, a Writers-in-Residence Program for women. She lives and creates in Oakland.
Jeremy Thompson, Poetry MFA ’06 curated and produced a traveling show of mixed media poetry, /Poetry Plastique/, featuring the work of many Mills graduate students and alumni, including Jacob Eichert, Dennis Somera, Dillon Westbrook, J.D. Mitchell, Cassie Smith, William Moor, Jennifer Dearinger, Lara Durback, Katrina Rodabaugh, Sarah A. Trott, M.Mara-Ann, Laurel DeCou, Jen Nellis, and Keith Mosier. Jeremy also recently performed at the Matrix Gallery, BAM/PFA, as part of Alison Smith’s traveling exhibition "Notion Nanny".
Patty Tumang, Prose MFA ‘06 and Jenesha de Rivera, Fiction MFA ’07 celebrated the release of the anthology they co-edited, Homelands: Women's Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time (Seal Press, 2007), with readings and launch events across the Bay Area. The anthology of personal essays explores the complicated notion of homeland.
Dillon Westbrook, Poetry MFA ’06 is the organizer of a new Oakland performance series, Prosody Castle, an ongoing reading into the apocrypha of literature at the Gallery of Urban Art in West Oakland. He also continues to perform music locally. An article he wrote about the Community Teaching Project was published in Oakland Magazine.
Meg Hamill, Poetry MFA ’05 has had her first book published in Factory School’s Heretical Text series. Meg wrote the book, Death Notices, for her MFA thesis while at Mills.
Sian Jones, Prose MFA ’04 had a story she wrote while at Mills, "Pilot," included in Best New American Voices 2006.
Sarah Stevenson, Prose MFA ‘04 recently appeared on the Central Valley’s NPR station, in a segment about National Novel Writing Month.
Padcha Tuntha-Obas, Poetry MFA ’04 recently had a book published by O Books. Tresspasses is a collection of poetry which moves between writing in Thai and English. Padcha wrote the book for her MFA thesis at Mills. Trespasses is available from Small Press Distribution. A chapbook by Padcha, composite.diplomacy, is also available from Tinfish Press.
Tara Weaver, Prose MFA ’04 continues to serve on the Litquake Executive Committee, and is responsible for the popular Litcrawl event, which has featured several Mills alumni and faculty the past few years. Tara also works as a developmental editor and has co-edited two collections of travel literature, Travelers’ Tales Tuscany and Travelers’ Tales Provence.
Julie Gamberg, Poetry MFA ’03 won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize for her first book, The Museum of Natural History, published by Eastern Washington University Press.
Becky Peterson MFA '03 is currently pursuing her PhD at the University of Minnesota.
Cynthia Sailers, Poetry MFA '03 is pursuing a PsyD at the Wright Institute. Her book, Lake Systems, was published by Tougher Disguises in 2004, and Atticus/Finch published her chapbook Rose Lungs. Cynthia also serves on the board of Small Press Traffic and curated the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003–05, with co-curator and fellow alumnus Julian Brolaski.
Julia Bloch, Poetry MFA ’02 is currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Sidebrow, The Big Ugly Review, and Bay Poetics. She was awarded the 2003 Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award and is the co-founder of Bigfan Press.
Michael Cross, Poetry MFA ’02 is currently pursuing a PhD at the SUNY Buffalo poetics program. Atticus/Finch, Michael’s chapbook press, just announced the release of its 10th book, Patrick F. Durgin’s Imitation Poems. Atticus/Finch has published titles by Elizabeth Willis, Brent Cunningham, Lisa Jarnot, Myung Mi Kim, Gregg Biglieri, Thom Donovan, and Kyle Schlesinger, and from fellow alums Cynthia Sailers, Eli Drabman, and Julian Brolaski.
Cassandra Dunn MFA '02 won the 2001 Fabilli/Hoffer Essay Prize. She currently works as a senior editor at UC Berkeley.
Stacy McKenna, Prose MFA ’02 is the program manager for Poetry Inside Out, an in-school writing program administered by the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco. Stacy has taught English and English as a Second Language in Bay Area community colleges, public elementary schools, private language schools, and for Upward Bound. Her translation work has appeared in Codols in New York and The Other Poetry of Barcelona: Spanish and Spanish-American Women Poets.
James Meetze, Poetry MFA ‘02 has a forthcoming first book, I Have Designed This For You, from assemblage editions. James lives in San Diego where he continues to do freelance book design and teaches creative writing at UCSD.
Julian Brolaski, Poetry MFA ’01 is currently pursuing a PhD at UC Berkeley. Julian co-curated the Holloway Poetry Series at UC Berkeley from 2004–06, and the New Brutalism series in Oakland from 2003–05, with co-curator and fellow alumnus Cynthia Sailers. Brolaski’s chapbooks include Letters to Hank Williams (True West Press, 2003), The Daily Usonian (Atticus/Finch 2004), and Madame Bovary’s Diary (Cy Press 2005).
Katherine Case, Poetry MFA ’01 is the studio manager and volunteer coordinator at San Francisco Center for the Book Studio, where she also teaches courses in letterpress. Katherine is a member of Thicket Press, which publishes fine arts books of poetry, including letterpressed books featuring work by herself and other Mills alumni.
Daphne Gottlieb, Poetry MFA ’01 performs and teaches writing workshops across the country and locally. Her newest book is Jokes and the Unconscious, a graphic novel published by Cleis Press and created with artist Diane DiMassa. Daphne also edited Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader (Soft Skull Press, 2001), and her book Final Girl (Soft Skull, 2003) was named one of the Village Voice’s Favorite Books of 2003 and winner of the Audre Lorde Award in Poetry for 2003 from Publishing Triangle.
Jackie Graves, Poetry MFA ’01 is an associate professor at Laney College. She recently worked on FUSION, a staging of work written by Laney students, faculty, and staff.
David Harrison Horton, Poetry MFA ’01 is an administrative assistant in the English Department at Mills College, where he also teaches comp. His video work was recently screened as part of an international exhibition in Caracas, Venezuela. He is co-editor of the Deep Oakland website with Stephanie Young.
Stephanie Young, Poetry MFA ’01 is the graduate program coordinator for the English Department at Mills, where she also advises and teaches poetry in the undergraduate program. Her first book, Telling the Future Off, was published by Tougher Disguises in 2005, and she is the editor of Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 2006), an anthology of writing from 110 Bay Area poets. Stephanie also serves on the board of Small Press Traffic and is co-editor with David Horton of the web project Deep Oakland.
Dan Godston, Poetry MFA ’00 is currently teaching at Columbia College.
Aidan Thompson, Poetry MFA ’00 is currently pursuing a PhD at SUNY Albany. Her second book, So Earnest to Have a Green Point, was published by Palimpsest Press in 2006, and her first book, Particle and Propability, came out in 2001 with Potes and Poets.
Thea Hillman, Poetry MFA ’99 continues to perform locally and around the country at bookstores, cafes, colleges, poetry festivals, theaters, and music venues. Her first book, Depending on the Light, was published by Manic D Press in 2001, and her second book, For Lack of a Better Word, is forthcoming from Suspect Thoughts Press. Thea recently served as a Trustee on the Mills College Board of Trustees, and as board chair and board member of the Board of the Intersex Society of North America.
Micheline Marcom, Prose MFA ’99 currently teaches fiction in the English graduate program at Mills. Her first novel, Three Apples Fell from Heaven (Riverhead, 2001), was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Foundation for first fiction and named one of the best books of the year by both the Washington Post and the LA Times. Her second novel, The Daydreaming Boy (Riverhead, 2004), was selected as a notable book of the year by the LA Times.
Susan Ito, Prose MFA ’94 is fiction co-editor for Literary Mama. She also co-edited A Ghost At Hearts Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books). Her essays and fiction have appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Hip Mama, Making More Waves, and elsewhere. She teaches writing privately and at UC Berkeley Extension.
Edie Meidav, Prose MFA ’93 was the 2006 winner of the annual Bard Fiction Prize, which confers a $30,000 cash award and appointment as writer in residence at the college for one semester. Meidav received the award for her second novel, Crawl Space, set in rural France in the 1940s and late 1990s, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2005. Her first novel, The Far Field, was published by Houghton Mifflin. She is the director of the MA/MFA program in Writing and Consciousness at the New College of California in San Francisco.
Natalee Bauer, MA ’07 will begin working toward her PhD at Rutgers University in Fall 2008.
Ting Chen, MA ’07 is pursuing a PhD at New York State University.
Amber Carini, MA ’06 is pursuing a PhD at the University of California, San Diego.
Greg Giles, MA ’06 is pursuing a PhD at the University of California, Davis.
Adriana Macias, MA ’06 is pursuing a PhD at Northeastern University.
Adan Olmedo, MA ’06 is pursuing a PhD at the University of Chicago.
Danielle Skeehan, MA ’06 is pursuing a PhD at Northeastern University.
Jennifer Weeks, MA ’06 is pursuing a PhD at Rice University.
Aynah Askanas, MA ’05 is teaching full-time at Diablo Valley College.
Yuriko Shinomori, MA ’05 is the translator working on a Japanese edition of faculty member Yiyun Li’s award-wining collection of short stories, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.
Richard Parent, MA ’00 received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and is currently an assistant professor of English at the University of Vermont.
Emily Anderson, MA ’97 received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and is currently an assistant professor at Knox College.
Jennifer Hoofard, MA ’97 received her PhD from the University of California, Davis and is currently teaching at Mills College.
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