Posted by: Tea-mahm | May 16, 2010

I hesitate to write about this poetry book, because I am intimated by its brilliance and inventiveness. But then I want to stand on a soapbox and shout out –Shadow Box! Yes! It’s that good. It’s also rich, deep and chewy as a California coastal mountain Cabernet, so you need to sip and savor it. Admire the color and complexity.  Fred Chappell has written embedded poems – a poem within a poem – and made it seem effortless.

To read the full article click here: http://completeword.wordpress.com/2010/05/16/shadow-box-by-fred-chappell-a-poetry-review/

To find out more about the MFA Writing Program at Greensboro click here: http://mfagreensboro.org

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In Drew Perry‘s first novel, thirtysomething protagonist Jack Lang negotiates the demands of suburban domesticity—holding together a crumbling marriage, raising a child with autism, managing a mulch-and-tree business, taking on over-the-top home-improvement projects—with varying degrees of success.

Read the full review here: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2010/apr/06/books-april/

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

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New from Viking: This is Just Exactly Like You by Drew Perry.

About the book, from the publisher:

A darkly humorous debut novel of suburban survival and life’s occasional miracles.

When Jack Lang impulsively buys a second house directly across the street from his own, his wife Beth leaves him-and their six-year-old autistic son, Hendrick-to move in with Jack’s best friend, Terry Canavan.
Read the full article here:
http://newreads.blogspot.com/2010/03/this-is-just-exactly-like-you.html

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

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The MFA Writing Program at UNC Greensboro, The Greensboro Review, and Spring Garden Press will host a fiction reading by Drew Perry on Thursday, April 1st at 7 PM in the UNCG Faculty Center on College Avenue.

Read the full article here:
http://www.gotriadscene.com/event/detail/26769/member_reviews/past

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

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By HAWKINS TEAGUE / Ledger & Times

Holly Goddard Jones reads from her book of short stories, “Girl Trouble” in Murray State University’s Clara M. Eagle Art Gallery Thursday night.

Read entire post here: http://www.murrayledger.com/articles/2010/03/12/local_news/local04.txt

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

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by Justin Bauer
 Mar 3, 2010

In Jillian Weise’s The Colony (Soft Skull, March 1), researchers gather subjects for radical gene therapy.
They can mend Alzheimer’s, they say, and delete a predisposition toward fat.

Anne Hatley, even as she participates in the study, remains unconvinced. With the cellular ability to regenerate new tissue three times faster than other people, she has the most promising genetic profile of the five subjects. The 25-year-old walks with a prosthetic leg; the researchers dangle the promise that she will be able to grow herself an entirely new limb.

Read the entire review:
http://citypaper.net/articles/2010/03/04/growing-pains

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

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Author Steve Almond reads from his new book, This Won’t Take but a Minute, Honey, and discusses his unique take on the art and craft of creative writing. This lecture is particularly geared towards creative writing students and beginning writers.

Watch the video here:
http://forum-network.org/lecture/steve-almond-101

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

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Anne Marie Macari’s She Heads into the Wilderness does show the reader at least two ways out of town. The book’s two sequences (and an epilogue) take us in the direction of eco-poetry (“Earth Elegy”) and of Edenic and post-Edenic myth (“Their Eyes Were Opened”). Her form of choice, unrhymed and heavily enjambed couplets, reminds the reader of the missing tertium quid, history, because the formal backstory of that form, in turn, points to a time when the couplet was poetry’s version of Q.E.D. and the poet and reader complicit in unpacking its connections and implications. History, which is at the other end of the title’s wilderness, can make of any trek a pilgrimage. Meanwhile, Macari’s frequent use to the unrhymed couplet underscores its other capacities: its ventilating pauses, its sinuous coursing, while holding in reserve its potential for pulling up and making a statement stand pat, even occasionally sounding the decisive click of the lock.

Read the entire review here:
http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/46/rigsbee_r.html

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

Technorati Tags: David-Rigsbee, MFA-Writing-Program-at-Greensboro-alumni, mfagreensboro, MFA, creative-writing, Greensboro, NC, UNCG

In her first novel, The Colony, poet and playwright Jillian Weise takes the familiar situation of a group of strangers on retreat—did someone say, “writers conference?”—and ups the ethical ante by making genetic defects their reason for being together. Successful applicants to the Colony at Cold Spring Harbor get $5,000 a month plus three months room and board in return for submitting their peculiar DNA for scientific research. They can choose whether to undergo potentially risky treatments while in residency, but the on-site geneticist assumes they’ll jump at the chance to be cured.

Read the entire review here:
http://therumpus.net/2010/02/mutations-of-meaning/

Find our more about The MFA Writing Program at Greensboro here:
http://mfagreensboro.org

Technorati Tags: Jillian_Wesie, MFA-Writing-Program-at-Greensboro-alumni, mfagreensboro, MFA, creative-writing, Greensboro, NC, UNCG

5 Q’s with George Singleton
by Susan Johnston @ Urban Muse Writer

George Singleton is the author of Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. In addition to publishing four collections of stories, he has contributed short stories to The Atlantic Monthly, Glimmer Train, North American Review, The Greensboro Review, storySouth, Esquire.com, and many other places. George and I discussed fiction writing as well as his favorite authors.

Urban Muse: You’ve taught writing, so what mistakes do you notice other writers making?

Read the entire interview here:
http://www.thewritenetwork.com/5-qs-with-george-singleton

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

Technorati Tags: George-Singleton, MFA-Writing-Program-at-Greensboro-alumni, mfagreensboro, creative-writing, North-Carolina, NC, UNCG