News from the School of IAS

Category: Creative Writing and Poetics

MFA Careers and Writing Futures event features journeys of local writers

On May 17, four MFA-trained writers met with students and alumni of the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program to discuss their career paths. Hosted at McMenamins Anderson School, conversation centered on the diverse ways writers grow and sustain their creative practices. Special guests included: MFA alumni Scott Brown (’15), Talena Lachelle Queen (’14) and Natalie Singer-Velush (’16), and local artist Sierra Nelson. ...

June 1, 2017

Amaranth Borsuk publishes audio poem

IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk has a new piece in Daily Gramma. Borsuk's audio poem, "elegy facing crochet holes and knit slubs with running stitch," is at once personal and outward-looking, an attempt to think through modes of mourning and resistance as they pass through hands engaged in the craft of caring. The title's impossible act references an attempt to ...

April 12, 2017

After the MFA: Good things come in small portions

By Natalie Singer-Velush ('16) The time spent as a student in an MFA program, especially the early months, can be overwhelming. There are never enough hours to read, to spend with new ideas, to fulfill the requirements of the program, and also follow our own newly developing inquiries and impulses. The time, conversely, is often also highly charged artistically: These new ideas, however demanding and sleep-depriving, activate a desire to engage deeply with language and art and the process of making and investigating these. One group of IAS’s MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics students responded to that charge by launching a micropress, a project that has evolved as its instigators have, and which has provided space for the incubation and expression of art and ideas within the realm of the program and, now, beyond.

March 20, 2017

Amaranth Borsuk speaks and reads in Montreal

IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk traveled to Montreal last week to attend the symposium Expanded Poetics: Romantic, Modernist, Contemporary. Hosted by the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University, an experimental research laboratory focused on materialist media studies and collaborative interdisciplinary research, the event brought together philosophers, literary scholars, and poets working in new media to discuss interdisciplinary poetics from Jena Romanticism to the present. Borsuk spoke about

March 20, 2017

Jeanne Heuving receives UW Bothell Distinguished Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Award

IAS faculty member Jeanne Heuving is the recipient of the fourth annual UW Bothell Distinguished Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity Award (DRSCA). The DRSCA is presented each year to a UW Bothell faculty member in recognition of scholarly or creative achievement that exemplifies the standards of excellence that are required by the research intensive education environment of UW Bothell. Heuving, one of UW Bothell’s Founding Faculty members ...

March 8, 2017

IAS faculty members Amaranth Borsuk and Sarah Dowling publish chapbook documenting Translational Poetics

Essay Press has just published Affect and Audience: Translational Poetics, a chapbook curated by Amaranth Borsuk, with an introduction by Sarah Dowling, and with contributions from micha cárdenas. The free digital publication documents a 2016 symposium at the Simpson Center for the Humanities, which Borsuk and Dowling hosted with Gregory Laynor (PIP) and Brian Reed (UW Seattle, English). The symposium Affect and Audience: Translational Poetics investigated ...

February 14, 2017

IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk performs and speaks in Los Angeles and Florida

This January, IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk traveled to Los Angeles to perform at the Armand Hammer Museum in the Hammer Readings, a series that this spring will feature Evie Shockley and Robert Pinsky. The reading marked Borsuk's return to a series that was formative in her own development as a poet while an undergraduate at UCLA. While she was in town, she was interviewed by Naiomi Desai, an editor of Westwind, UCLA's undergraduate literary magazine. At her January 19 reading ...

February 3, 2017

Amaranth Borsuk Publishes Media Work

IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk has a video essay in the latest issue of the Bellingham Review, which launched Tuesday. Part of a special section on "The Kinetic Page," her video essay takes Ann Hamilton's 2014 exhibition at the Henry Art Gallery, The Common S E N S E, as a jumping off point to think about the relationship between reading and touch, which are central to her recent interdisciplinary collaboration Abra (1913 Press, 2016), a print book and free iOS app. Borsuk also ...

November 21, 2016

Natalie Singer-Velush Receives Honorable Mention from AWP’s Intro Journals Project

Natalie Singer-Velush (Creative Writing & Poetics, 2016) was named among the 2016 Winners of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Intro Journals Project, with an Honorable Mention for Creative Non-Fiction for her submission “There is But One Choice: Confession or Some Form of Extinction.” The Intro Journals Project is a literary competition for the discovery and publication of the best new works by students enrolled in AWP member programs, as nominated by the programs. Winning selections are published in participating journals, including Tampa Review, Colorado Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review, among others. The essay contains an excerpt from her memoir, California Calling, for which she is seeking a publisher.

October 19, 2016