Alumni
Among our alumni are published novelists, two Pulitzer-Prize nominees for journalism, a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award winner, and a Yaddo Fellowship recipient. Our alumni and students have had their stories, poetry, and reviews accepted for publication in journals and papers such as The Atlanta Constitution, Kalliope, African American Review, The Virginian Pilot, North American Review, Glimmer Train and American Literary Review. They have presented papers at a number of national conferences, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication, the Popular Culture Association of the South, and American Culture Association.
Selected Works by Recent Alumni
Nicole Mazzarella, 2001, is the author of This Heavy Silence. The Chicago Sun-Times said of her first novel, "Simply put, This Heavy Silence is a great read…this is a complex and layered novel about the choices we make and the relationships we build. In [Mazzarella's] writing, she traverses universal ideas and builds characters that will be familiar to a broad cross-section of people, no matter who they are and what they believe."
Her novel, which began as a short story written for Sheri Reynolds' workshop and became her thesis project directed by Janet Peery, has won a number of awards (see www.nicolemazzarella.com for more details). The Library Journal named it one of the Best Books of 2005 and described it as "An understated literary gem."
Nicole has taught creative writing at Wheaton College for the past five years and lives in the Chicago-area with her husband and daughter.
Farideh Goldin, 2002, is the author of Wedding Song: Memoirs of an Iranian Jewish Woman (Brandeis UP, 2003). Farideh was born in 1953 in Shiraz, Iran, to a family of dayanim, the judges and leaders of the Jewish community. Farideh's family moved out of the mahaleh, the Jewish ghetto, to a Moslem neighborhood when she was eight years old, where she experienced both friendship and anti-Semitism. Later, attending an American-style university, she was torn between her loyalty to her family, who obeyed strict social, cultural and religious mores, and her western education that promoted individualism and self-reliance. Wedding Song reveals Farideh's struggle in balancing her two worlds. In her later essays, she confronts issues of identity as she searches for a place in American society as an Iranian immigrant.
Many of her lectures give Goldin's audiences a better understanding of her Iranian culture. Her workshops convey her cross-cultural perspective on issues and lead participants to interact and shape their own skills for recording life narratives. She has spoken at churches, synagogues, women's groups, book fairs, universities, Junior Leagues, libraries, international conferences and numerous other venues both in the United States and abroad. Her book and essays have been part of the curriculum in many universities. Visit her website at www.faridehgoldin.com.
Melissa Range, 1997, has published her poetry in The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Western Humanities Review, and Poetry London; she has publications forthcoming from Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion. She is the Winner of the 2006 Rona Jaffe Award, the 2007 Discovery / The Nation award, and is a 2007-2008 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Lenore Hart, 2000, has published poetry, short stories, nonfiction, reviews, and illustrations in The Apalachee Quarterly, Blackwater Review, Brutarian Magazine, Chesapeake Life, Delmarva Quarterly, The Flagler Review and others. Her work has been included in the anthologies In Good Company and Turnings: Writing on Women's Transformations, and her novel Waterwoman was a Barnes and Noble "Discover" title, and an alternate selection of the Literary Guild. Her other novels include Ordinary Springs and The Treasure of Savage Island, a novel for young adults. Visit her website at http://www.lenorehart.com/.
Scott Anderson, 2006, won the Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers.
Natalie Diaz, 2007, won the Pablo Neruda Prize for poetry.
