MFA Greensboro Alum Angela Davis-Gardner Reviewed, 'Butterfly's Child'

book review: Butterfly's Child by Angela Davis-Gardner
The backstory: When Jennifer Egan listed Butterfly's Child as her favorite read of 2011, I knew I wanted to read it.
The basics:

In Butterfly's Child, Angela Davis-Gardner imagines what happens after Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly.
(The novel opens with a synopsis of the opera.) Butterfly's child,
Benji, goes to the United States with his father, Pinkerton, and his
father's new wife, Kate. They live on a small Illinois farm.

Read the full review here: http://nomadreader.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-butterflys-child-by-angela.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Michael Gills Featured in the Industrial Worker Book Review, "Last Words on Lonoke"

"Last Words on Lonoke"
     Michael Gills

for Fred Chappell

O.W. bought me a .30-ought six the Christmas I turned thirteen, said,
"Don't point at anything you don't want to kill," and that was pretty
much it for my gun safety lessons.  By Arkansas spring time, when gold
light flitted down through the new-leaf within view of the oak where
we'd slung foundering Shawnee up so he couldn't lay down and die, I
unloaded on one of the cargo planes that ever circled us from the base
over to J-ville, and the son-of-a-bitch crashed.   The woods beyond the
railroad track blazed.  It looked for all the world like God and Jesus
and Holy Ghost had reached down and slapped the shit out of the wood
beyond our back pasture, then set it afire just to make sure we got the
point.  Nobody was killed–they found the ejected pilot in a Butlerville
cow pasture, and turns out that it's nearly impossible to knock a Cargo
plane out of the sky with a deer gun.  But for a long time, even as a
grown man, I thought on those spent shells at my feet, each brassy
cartridge the length of my middle finger.  Night dreams featured a
fuselage burning and hissing beneath the hickories, me paralyzed in my
tracks, thinking Goddam.  This is me.  This is who I am now.

Read the full story here: http://www.iwwbookreview.com/Last-Words-on-Lonoke.htm

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Julie Brooks Barbour Featured in Diode, "North Carolina College for Women 1992"

Julie Brooks Barbour

North Carolina College for Women 1992

We knew we were women.
I mean, there were boys about

and we knew that need.
We also had the need

to be taken seriously
outside of our hometowns,

away from parents and secrets
we didn’t want to discuss.

Read the full poem here: http://diodepoetry.com/v5n2/content/barbour_jb.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Claudia Emerson Is One of Three Major Poets with Ties to NC and a New Book

Three by Three

April is National Poetry Month, and how appropriate, three big league poets with strong ties to North Carolina – Claudia Emerson, Michael McFee and Joseph Millar – have new books out.

Emerson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for “Late Wife,” is a graduate of the MFA program at UNCG. She teaches at Mary Washington University in Fredericksburg, Va. She was poet laureate of Virginia from 2008 to 2010.

Read the full article here: http://www.news-record.com/blog/63640/entry/141784

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Michael Gills Featured in Top Reads List

Heidi's Pick Six: Michael Gills (RDSP)
For the next two weeks I'll be featuring authors from the cutting edge Raw Dog Screaming Press! Founded in August 2003, RDSP books are entertaining and thought-provoking and span the gamut from surreal and absurd to horror, sci-fi and fantasy.

1. Which of your characters is your favorite?

2. Tell me about your travels.
November, the Go Love tour crossed the Mississippi into Carolina, cruised the Outer Banks in a hard rain, down through Wilmington to Sunset Beach where I slept within a rock's throw of the breakers, through all of South Carolina in pitch dark (the best way), hit the Georgia Pig outside Brunswick for killer barbecue, then west toward Dothan, Alabama where the earth's premier peanut-fest went down in full splendor, south to Ocala where the author of Purple Jesus introduced me, then scenic 75 to A1A up to St. Augustine, where I made offering and prayer to Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Bien Parto, sweet lady.

Read the full list here: http://heidirubymiller.blogspot.com/2012/04/heidis-pick-six-michael-gills-rdsp.html

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Camille Dungy Talks about the Difficulties of Getting Published

FAQs: Is It Hard to Get Published?
     by Camille Dungy
I want to answer a question I’ve been asked quite frequently by young writers. They tell me they’ve been writing for a little while and they love writing and they want to know if it will be hard for them to publish their work.

Yes, publishing is difficult. Or at least, publishing well can be difficult. And by publishing well, I mean publishing good poems in venues other people think are important, the kind of venues that can garner you literary cache. One of the first things you have to decide as a writer is how much that matters to you, literary cache.

Read the full article here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/faqs-is-it-hard-to-get-published/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org

MFA Greensboro Alum Claudia Emerson Talks about Performing with Kent Ippolito

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org