Ralph Adamo (M.F.A. 1974) was recently promoted to full professor at Xavier University of Louisiana and also appointed editor of Xavier University Press. (He has been editor of its international literary magazine for several years now.) In January 2020, his eighth book of poems was published – All the Good Hiding Places (Black Widow Press).
Kelly Jennings (M.F.A. 1990; Ph.D. 1995) has a short story coming out in an anthology in Spring 2020. The short story is “Little Bird,” and the anthology, published by Candlemark & Gleam, is Retellings of the Inland Sea.
Amy Nawrocki’s (M.F.A. 2001) sixth collection of poetry, Mouthbrooders, was released in the summer of 2019 by Homebound Publications. A description of the collection, along with a number of reviews, is available here: https://amynawrocki.org/2019/09/21/mouthbrooders/
Bradley Summerhill (M.F.A. 2000) published Engaging Discourse: A 21st Century Composition Reader and Curriculum (Kendall Hunt 2020), a textbook for first year college composition that focuses on cognitive development. Engaging Discourse 2.0 is slated for Fall 2020. The second volume in the series focuses on crossover conversations that are timeless and timely, including AI, social media, brain plasticity, information age literacy, appropriation, the biology of love, generation studies, and happiness studies.
Michael Ray Taylor’s (M.F.A. 1996) new book, Hidden Nature: Wild Southern Caves, a mixture of personal memoir and natural history, will be published this fall by Vanderbilt University Press. He frequently writes book reviews and author interviews for Chapter 16, a Tennessee literary website, including once in a great while interviews with fellow alums like Tom Franklin. An OpEd Michael wrote for the New York Times in 2018 led to his work the past year on a documentary film about White Nose Syndrome, a disease devastating North America’s bat populations. The film should be released online later this year, and he’s hoping to do more documentary work in the future. Meanwhile, Michael is a professor and the chair of the Communication and Theatre Arts department at Henderson State University, where he has taught nonfiction writing since 1991. His three sons all hold degrees from UA-Fayetteville and live and work in the Fayetteville area.
Lee Zacharias’s (M.F.A. 1976) most recent novel, Across the Great Lake, won the 2019 North Carolina Sir Walter Raleigh Award and a 2019 silver medal in literary fiction from the Independent Publishers Association, and was named a 2019 Notable Michigan Book. A new paperback edition will be released by the University of Wisconsin Press spring 2020. Runaway, an anthology she co-edited with Luanne Smith and Michael Gills, will be released spring 2020 from Madville Publishing, which will issue her next novel, What a Wonderful World This Could Be, in June 2021.