Alumni Careers

The Department of Writing & Poetics is proud of the accomplishments of its students and graduates. In recent years, Naropa alumni/ae have gone on to succeed in both the publishing and academic worlds. The following is a selection of publications, 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, and a Fulbright fellowship. Other awards include the 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, as well as the Poetry Play Jamboree in San Francisco.  Among other accomplishments, Naropa poets have appeared on MTV’s “Spoken Word” and on the PBS series “The United States of Poetry.”

Selected Book Publications (Poetry):

• Heather C. Akerberg dwelling (Burning Deck Press) will be available from www.spdbooks.org in spring 2008.
• Gary Allen The Missionary Who Forgot His Name (Selva Editions)
• Melissa Benham codeswitching (Subday)
• Mary Burger Nature’s Maw Gives & Gives (Duration Press) and has been 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)
• Veronica Corpuz TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003)
• 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 diariy 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) 
• Thomas R. Peters, Jr. Over the Roofs of the World (Cityful Press) and 100 Missed Train Stations (Holy Mackeral Press). 
• Michelle Naka Pierce TRI/VIA (Erudite Fangs/PUB LUSH, 2003)
• Chuck Pirtle Talaria (Rodent 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)
• Max Regan faithless (Rodent Press)
• Joe Richey Riding the Big Earth: Poems 1980-86 (National Poetry Foundation)
• Randy Roark Awakening Osiris (Selva) A Book of the Dead: Selected Poems (Baksun Books)
• Eleni Sikelianos The Monster Lives of Boys and Girls (Green Integer), The California Poem (Coffee House), and The Book of Jon (City Lights), The Book of Tendons (Post Apollo Press), To Speak while Dreaming (Selva) and Earliest Worlds (Coffee House Press)
• Jenny Smith Egon (Involute Press)
• Kaisa Ullsvik Unspoiled Air (Fence Books, 2008)
• 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)

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.

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.

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)
• Junior Burke Something Gorgeous (farfalla Press/McMillan & Parrish)
• Matt Corry Monolith (Xurban)
• Brenda Coultas Early Films (Rodent Press)
• Geoffrey Goodwin has an piece and in anthology 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)
• Sean Murphy The Hope Valley Hubcap King (Bantam), The Finished Man (Delmark), The Time of New Weather (Delta)
• 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)
• Sean Murphy One Bird, One Stone: 108 American Zen Stories (Renaissance Books)
• Mathew Rick essay on Alchemical Fiction for Magical Blend Magazine
• 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’s 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
• Marlowe Fawcett co-wrote and co-directed The Other Half for Piper Films.
• Kevin Kilroy’s play The Silence of Malachi Ritscher, directed by Lewis Lain, was put on by the group Theatre 5.2.1 in Chicago.
• 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’s novella, Prairie Fire, adapted for the stage, won the Mae West Playwrights Festival award.

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.

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, and 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, 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) and  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) 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.
• Junior Burke, chair of the Writing & Poetics Department, won New Millennium Competition award for Media Blues an essay on Jack Kerouac.
• 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.
• Laura Hawley placed a story in The Best New American Voices 2002 (judged by Joyce Carol Oates) and secured an agent.
• Brian Jacobs received his second Fulbright scholarship to study in China.
• Vishal Khana received a Fellowship in Literature from the North Carolina Arts Council in 2005.
• Jesse Marisol was offered an internship with Atlantic Monthly magazine.
• Sean Murphy winner 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. 
• Mike O’Connor received National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2003
• Karen Rathert winner of Mae West Playwrights Festival award for Prairie Fire. 
• 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 a winner of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Fulbright Fellowship, and two Gertrude Stein Awards for Innovative American Writing.
• Jenny Smith is 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
• 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.