News from the School of IAS
Alumni support virtual human rights seminar
While the pandemic has pushed most courses online, students continue to benefit from rich learning experiences like UW Bothell’s annual Washington D.C. Human Rights Seminar. When the 2020 D.C. Seminar went virtual, leaders Ron Krabill and Jung Lee enlisted the program’s vital network in a series of online dialogues. Several IAS alumni joined this cadre of experts and mentors, sharing their firsthand experiences with human rights and social justice. ...
October 9, 2020
Troy Landrum Jr. wins first Quarantine Book Club Fellowship
Troy Landrum Jr., second-year student in the UW Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program, is the winner of the first Quarantine Book Club Fellowship. This fellowship supports Troy’s four week long in-depth study of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved as part of the Quarantine Book Club, a nationwide group of ...
October 9, 2020
MFA / Essay Press Announce third annual book contest
The MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics has just announced its third annual book contest with Essay press, with submissions open until December 5, 2020. This year's judge is Renee Gladman, a former keynote speaker at the MFA's Fall Convergence and previous visiting writer, who taught a graduate workshop at UW Bothell in spring 2016. Learn more about ...
October 8, 2020
Frances Lee and Stephanie Segura awarded Hugo Fellowships
IAS alumni Frances Lee (Master of Arts in Cultural Studies) and Stephanie Segura (MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics) were recently awarded Hugo Fellowships for 2020-21. The Hugo Fellowship supports emerging writers, providing space and resources to four to six fellows in the Seattle area to complete a proposed project ...
October 8, 2020
Jin-Kyu Jung coauthors “Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework”
IAS faculty member Jin-Kyu Jung has published a coauthored article, “Community geography: Toward a disciplinary framework” in Progress in Human Geography. This collaborative paper introduces and defines community geography as a growing subfield in geography that provides a framework for engaged scholarship as ...
October 7, 2020
Breka Blakeslee publishes Probably It Will Not Be Okay
IAS alum Breka Blakeslee (MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics, '15) has published their debut novel, Probably It Will Not Be Okay, which began its life as the author's MFA thesis. From the publisher's page: "Probably It Will Not Be Okay takes place at the end of the anthropocene. People and animals, what's left of them, share the ruins of a human city ...
October 6, 2020
Ching-In Chen publishes “Lantern Letter: a Zuihitsu”
IAS faculty member Ching-In Chen’s “Lantern Letter: a Zuihitsu" was published in Watch Your Head: Writers & Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis, a print anthology published by Coach House Books in conjunction with an online project that publishes writing and art about climate justice issues and the climate crisis. In Watch Your Head, poems, stories, essays, and artwork sound the alarm on ...
October 2, 2020
A major milestone for GWSS
The discipline now known as Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies (GWSS) is celebrating its 50th anniversary worldwide this year. At the University of Washington Bothell, Oct. 26, 2020 will mark the four-year anniversary of the GWSS major and minor. IAS faculty member and GWSS faculty coordinator Julie Shayne had a goal to develop the major on campus since joining UW Bothell in 2007. In 2014, she became one of the committee members charged with creating the degree program, which officially launched in 2016. Since then, 18 students have graduated with the major and 73 students with the minor.
October 2, 2020
Amaranth Borsuk publishes new poem in Cordite Poetry Review
The most recent issue of Australian contemporary poetry and art journal Cordite Poetry Review focuses on the theme of Propaganda. The poetry section, curated by Simon Groth and Mez Breeze, features works that interrogate language's use and abuse and includes a new poem by IAS faculty member Amaranth Borsuk titled "Whisper Campaign." In the editors' words, "This distinction—of poetry manifesting as an antithesis to propaganda ...
October 2, 2020
MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics students and alumni interview recently-published authors
Since 2018, the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics has collaborated with Essay Press on the annual publication of a work or works of innovative prose. The first two books in the series were published this summer, and MFA students and alumni have come together to interview the authors to gain deeper insights into their work and poetics. Stephanie Segura (2020), N. L. Sweeney (2020) and Scott Bentley (2021) interviewed Katherine Agyemaa Agard about their book of colour, an experimental essay about color, hybridity, and art-making that provides a memoir of Agyemaa Agard’s coming to North America and encountering binaries of black and white within global anti-blackness. Cliff Watson (2021), Annika Bunney (2021), and Sabina Livadariu (2020) spoke with Kaia Preus about ...
October 2, 2020