It’s been a good fall for Mountaineer writers. Read on to find out about our alumni and current student achievements. Please share your recent achievements by emailing Rebecca Thomas.

Alumni

Check out MFA alumna Sarah Beth Childers’ short story “Shorn” in Wigleaf.

Eric Cipriani (BA) won first place in a fiction contest sponsored by New Southerner_magazine for his short story “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.”

Amanda Cobb (MFA) translated fourteen of Miguel Saporta Bon’s poems. She read the translations with him at a recent event co-sponsored by the English and Foreign Languages Department. Her poem “You Owe Me a Coke” will appear in The Boiler Journal. This fall, her poems “Dummy” and “Because I Said So” will appear in a special print “Trap Doors and Little Triggers” themed edition of Temenos Journal. Excerpts from her memoir Low-Self Esteem: My Jesus Years will appear this winter in Spitoon.

Renée K. Nicholson’s (MFA) essay “Coda: Partnering” is forthcoming in Blue Lyra Review, and her essay “Hair: A Short History” is forthcoming in Switchback. She has joined the book review staff of Los Angeles Review. Her interview with Steve Almond is in Fiction Writers Review. She was also just made a voting member of the Dance Critics Association.

Natalie Sypolt (MFA) has won Glimmer Train’s New Writer’s Contest. Her craft essay appears in November’s Glimmer Train Bulletin and her story “My Brothers and Me” will appear in the February issue of Glimmer Train.

Renee Nicholson and Natalie Sypolt will present “Radio Girls: Our Journey in Book Podcasting” at the annual Winter Wheat Writers’ Conference sponsored by Mid American Review at Bowling Green State University. Their podcast, SummerBooks, went from idea to over 700 hits in three months.

Laura Leigh Morris (MFA) will be Artist-in-Residence for the next two years at a Texas prison, the Bryan Federal Prison Camp. She will be teaching creative writing.

Current Students

Morgan O’Grady, MFA candidate in Poetry, will have her poem “Elegy to R.M.O, Not Yet Dead” published both online and in the next print issue of Susquehanna Review.

Shane Stricker, MFA candidate in Fiction, will have his short story “How to Lose a Mother and a Brother in the Same Day: The Story of a Drive-Thru Funeral” appear in an upcoming issue Midwestern Gothic.

Jacqulyn Wilson, MFA candidate in Poetry, has had her poem “Morning After a Snow Storm,” published in the August 2012 edition of The Orange Room Review.