The Department of Writing & Poetics is proud of the accomplishments of its students and graduates. The following is a selection of publications, honors, prizes, and fellowships earned by graduates of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
Poetry
Naropa poets have received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two Colorado State Arts grants, a Fulbright fellowship, a Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative Writing. Graduates have been winners of the National Poetry Series, Fence Motherwell Prize, and the Poetry Play Jamboree in San Francisco. Naropa poets have appeared on MTV’s “Spoken Word” and on the PBS series “The United States of Poetry.”
Graduates of Naropa’s poetry program publish widely in a variety of print and online magazines, including Conjunctions, Chicago Review, Jacket Magazine, Tarpaulin Sky, Slope, First Intensity, Ecopoetics, Double Change, apex of the M, Nerve Lantern, Fence, Belladonna, and Denver Quarterly.
Selected Book Publications (Poetry):
Heather C. Akerberg:dwelling (Burning Deck Press)
Gary Allen:The Missionary Who Forgot His Name (Selva Editions)
Melissa Benham: codeswitching (Subday)
Mary Burger:Nature’s Maw Gives & Gives (Duration Press); anthologized in An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman House)
John Cohn:The Dance of Yellow Lightning over the Ridge (Writer’s & Books), audio recording: Antenna (MusEx Records)
Joseph Cooper:Autobiography of a Stutterer(BlazeVOX Books)
Brenda Coultas:A Handmade Museum (Coffee House), anthologized in An Anthology of New (American) Poets (Talisman)
Steve Creson:Limestone Cave (Elbow)
Darrin Daniel:figo (Cityful), co-founder of Cityful Press
Tracy Davis:First Love and Others (Dead Metaphor)
Tyler Doherty: Bodhidharma Never Came to Hatboro (Bootstrap)
Mark DuCharme: Infinity Subsections (Meeting Eyes), Desire Series (Dead Metaphor), Cosmopolitan Tremble (Pavement Saw)
Kari Edwards:have been blue for charity (BlazeVox), a diary of lies (Belladonna), post/pink (Scarlet), anthologized in Electric Spandex: anthology of writing the queer text (Pyriform)
Ryan Gallagher:Plum Smash and Other Flashbulbs (Bootstrap)
Scott Gibson: edited Blood and Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepherd (Painted Leaf)
Andy Hoffman: chapbook GESTURE: Collom, Creason, Peters (Cityful Press)
D. Robert Lessing:Conjugation (Rodent Press)
Rachel Levitsky: Under the Sun (Futurepoem Books) Cartographies of Error (Leroy Chapbook Series), The Adventures of Yaya and Grace (Potes and Poets Press)
Kaisa Ullsvik Miller: Unspoiled Air (Fence Books)
Thomas R. Peters, Jr.: Over the Roofs of the World (Cityful Press) and 100 Missed Train Stations (Holy Mackeral Press).
Laurie Price: Except for Memory (Pantograph Press), Under the Sign of the House (Detour)
Jeni Olin:Blue Collar Holiday & A Valentine for Frank O’Hara (Hanging Loose Press)
Nicholas Michael Ravnikar:Just Talking Shit (Detumescence)
Max Regan:faithless (Rodent Press)
Joe Richey:Riding the Big Earth: Poems 1980-86 (National Poetry Foundation)
Randy Roark:Awakening Osiris (Selva) and A Book of the Dead: Selected Poems (Baksun Books)
John Sakkis:Gary Gygax (chapbook) (Cy Gist Press); work appears in Five Fingers Review and the Bedside Guide To No Tell Motel anthology
Eleni Sikelianos:The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls (Green Integer), The California Poem (Coffee House), The Book of Jon (City Lights), The Book of Tendons (Post Apollo Press),To Speak while Dreaming (Selva), Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press)
Jenny Smit:Egon (Involute Press)
Chris Vitiello:surrepetitious (Oblitterate Books), Nouns Swarm a Verb (Xurban Books)
Richard Wilmarth:Voices in the Room and The Henry Miller Acrostics
John Wright:Bookstore Cowboys ( Snake Oil Press), Outlaw (Rodent Press)
Laura Wright:Part of the Design (Meeting Eyes), Hunger Is a Place (Last Minute Productions), Hide: What’s Difficult (Poetry New York Editions), Everything Automatic (Belladonna Books)
Katie Yates: Reference (We Press), so difficulty (Rodent Press)
Prose
Alumni/ae have been winners of the Raymond Carver Contest, Prism International Short Story Award, Story Magazine Competition, Boulder Weekly Short Fiction Competition, Dana Award in the Novel, Ernest Hemingway First Novel Award, Atlantic Monthly Student Fiction Competition, American Academy’s Nicholas Screenplay Award, Green River Writers Novel Contest, and Footpaths to Creativity Center award. Graduates have also won Fulbright fellowships and Camargo and Yaddo Colony residencies.
Graduates of Naropa’s prose track regularly publish in magazines such as Harper’s, Bomb, Fence, Story,Grand Street, and The Quarterly. Alumni/ae have published in the following anthologies: Paraspheres, Saints of Hysteria, Looking Back: Stories of Our Mothers and Fathers, and more.
Selected Book Publications (Fiction):
Chris Baer:Sometimes Rachel and Seizure (Rodent Press), Kiss Me, Judas and Penny Dreadful (Penguin), Hell’s Half Acre and Godspeed (Macadam Cage)
Geoffrey Goodwin: anthologized in The Best of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet (Del Rey) and writes for BookSlut.com
Jimmy Gleacher:Its How You Play the Game (Scribner and Piatkus)
Laird Hunt:Dear Sweetheart, Pieces, Thousands, and The Paris Stories (Smokeproof Press); The Exquisite, The Impossibly, and Indiana, Indiana (Coffee House)
Kevin Kilroy:published three chapbooks: Proper Fist, Four buildings on Mardou Street, and My Heart Had Did Something. He also has an interview with Mary Burger entitled, “Time-Stopping, Points of Friction, and Other Narrative Events” published in Rain Taxi.
Sean Murphy:The Hope Valley Hubcap King (Bantam), The Finished Man (Delmark), The Time of New Weather (Delta)
Lesléa Newman: published children’s books including Skunk’sSpring Surprise and Daddy’s Song among fifty other books
Gavin Pate:The Way to Get Here (Bootstrap)
Barbara Purbaugh: Tracks
Selected Book Publications (Non-fiction):
John Cohn:Sign Mind: Studies in America Sign Language Poetics (Museum of American Poetics)
Pirooz Kalayeh: memoir Looking Back: Stories of Our Mothers and Fathers (New Brighten Books)
Scott MacFarlane: The Hippie Narrative: A Literary Perspective on the Counterculture (McFarland)
Sean Murphy:One Bird, One Stone: 108 American Zen Stories (Renaissance Books)
Mathew Rick: essay on Alchemical Fiction for Magical Blend Magazine
Shawn Rohrbach:Open Your Heart With Bicycling: Mastering Life Through Love of the Road (DreamTime Publishing), The Tiger Guide to Information Security (Golden Bear) and Playing the Game (Cacoethes)
Deena Wade:interview with Alexs D. Pate, Writing Toward Home & Into Exile (Bloomsbury Review)
Jenn Zuko-Boughn: Stage Combat: Fisticuffs, Stunts, and Swordplay for Theatre and Film (Allworth)
Selected Achievements in Film and Drama:
Junior Burke: Filmscript American Reel released was released in 1998
Eric Carlson: her short story The Powerful One Within has been optioned for a film
Ozzie Cheek: produced the teleplay Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye for Fox in 2000 and contracted teleplays for NBC and HBO
Michael Shuan Conaway:co-founded a production company, StoryWorks, and from that venture came the independent film company, Watermoon Films
Stacy Elaine Dacheux:co-wrote a film: http://www.nowandnowhere.com/trailer.html
Marlowe Fawcett: co-wrote and co-directed The Other Half for Piper Films
Jenice Gharib: short play Some Kiss We Want was performed in February 2007
Kevin Kilroy: play The Silence of Malachi Ritscher, directed by Lewis Lain, was put on by the group Theatre 5.2.1 in Chicago
David Madgalene: directed a film Cities of the Dead
Dylan Patterson: produced and directed two documentaries: The Other Road and Jabberwocky in Mexico
Barbara Purbaugh: secured an agent and optioned the film rights for her Naropa manuscript, a novel
Karin Rathert: novella, Prairie Fire, adapted for the stage, won the Mae West Playwrights Festival award
Carey Westbrook: produced a three minute movie entitled “The Story of a Life”
Translation
Translators have won a New York State Council for the Arts Translation Grant. Their books include Richard Froude Tarnished Mirrors: Poems of Charles Baudelaire, Ryan Gallagher Blues from Rome: Translations of Catullus, Mike O’Connor and Red Pine The Clouds Should Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China, When You Find Me Again I Will Be in the Mountains: Selected Poems of Chia Tao,Where the World Does Not Follow and Doris Pai Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (classical Chinese poems), Mary Burns translatedpoems of Friederike Mayrocker, and Shin Yu Pai Poems from Classical Chinese. John Wright published translations from the 9th century Irish, A Cabin in the Woods: A Dialog between King Guaire and his brother Marban (Boar Hog Press). Kristen Andersen translated post-Negritude poetry of Africa and the Caribbean for a forthcoming anthology of Francophone poetry.
Publishing Presses
Several Naropa alumni/ae have founded presses. These include Roger Snell (Mungo Vs. Ranger) and (Sardines Press), Randy Roark (Laocoon Press) Karen Rathert (City Press), Rachel Levitsky (Belladonna Books)Brad O’Sullivan (Smokehouse Press), Michael Koshkin and Jennifer Rogers (Hot Whiskey Press), Gary Parrish and Tyler Burba (Farfalla Press/ McMillan & Parrish), and Ryan Gallagher (Bootstrap Press).
Selected Honors
Amy Arenson, Mark Bernheim, Joan Harvey, and Veronica Stapleton contributed critical essays to the anthology Richard Brautigan: A Collection of Essays.
Duncan Barlow received his Ph.D. from Denver University in 2006.
Junior Burke, chair of the Writing & Poetics Department, won New Millennium Competition award for Media Blues an essay on Jack Kerouac.
Clara Burnswas appointed the Library Services Director for Front Range Community College in the College Hill Library at the Westminster campus.
Matt Corry won a Colorado Arts Council grant.
Danika Dinsmore was hired as Executive Director of Eleventh Hour Productions in October of 2000.
Kari Edwards won New Langton Art’s Bay Area Award for Literature in 2002.
Jack Greene received a Colorado Arts Council grant for his poetry in 2000.
Jim Goaredits a new online magazine, past simple, at www.pastsimple.org.
Laura Hawley placed a story in The Best New American Voices 2002 (judged by Joyce Carol Oates) and secured an agent.
Brian Jacobs received a grant from Fund For Teachers, which sent him to South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Britain, and France. He also received his second Fulbright scholarship to study in China.
Vishal Khana received a Fellowship in Literature from the North Carolina Arts Council in 2005.
AC Lambeth was a finalist in the 2004 William Faulkner/William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition and is an award winner in the 2006 Katherine Anne Porter Prize for the Short Story.
Brooke Lehrer was hired to be the program director of SlamChops in New York, a subsidiary of Slam in the Schools, which originated from the Mayhem Poets.
Jesse Marisol was offered an internship with Atlantic Monthly magazine.
Kaisa Ullsvik Miller won the Fence Books Motherwell Prize for Unspoiled Air.
Sean Murphywinner of Ernest Hemingway First Novel Award for 101 American Zen Stories (Renaissance Books). The Hope Valley Hubcap King (Bantam) was chosen for the American Bookseller Association book sense list for 2003. He also signed a two-book novel contract with Bantam.
Lesléa Newman has been selected by the Northampton Arts Council as Poet Laureate of Northampton.
Mike O’Connorreceived National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2003
Eric Olson received his Ph.D. from Denver University in 2006.
Shin Yu Pai was awarded the 2008 Jeanne Lohmann Poetry Prize from the Olympia Poetry Network for her poem “Footprint.”
Karen Rathert was the winner of Mae West Playwrights Festival award for Prairie Fire.
Shawn Rohrbach’s Open You Heart with Bicycling: Mastering Life Through Love of the Road received Honorable Mention at the 2007 London Book Awards.
Sue Salinger showed her video work at the ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change conference on media and social change in Oxford, England, and at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.
Eleni Sikelianos is awinner of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing.
Jenny Smithis founder of Prazska Skola Poetiky, a Czech and international school of poetics in Prague and Program Assistant at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church, NYC
Mary Tischlerhas accepted a position as writer-in-residence with the InsideOut Literary Arts Organization in Detroit, Michigan.
Lisa Trank, a prose writer and poet, received a grant from the Rocky Mountain Women’s Institute.
Rachel Weaver has secured a literary agent for her Naropa fiction manuscript.
