Alumni News

Sandra Beasley (B.A. English, Area Program in Poetry Writing, 2002) sends the following announcement from Publisher’s Weekly:  ""Crown executive editor Heather Jackson preempted world rights to Sandra Beasley's Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life; Glen Hartley at Writers' Representatives made the sale. In this sometimes humorous memoir, poet and American Scholar editor Beasley will intertwine her personal experience­-she is allergic to well over a dozen common foods­-with the cultural history of allergy. Beasley, who at one time had a brief stint as a food critic, is the author of the poetry collection Theories of Falling, published by New Issues. Crown's pub date is late 2010."

Karen Lillis (B.A., English, 1992) will have her third book of fiction published by Six Gallery Press in February 2009. Titled The Second Elizabeth, the story is set in a sweltering Charlottesville summer. Known at UVa for her satiric advice column in The Declaration, "Kisses, The Bitch," Ms. Lillis was recently featured in the anthology, Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Xxperimental Prose by Contemporary Women Writers (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2008). Ms. Lillis currently resides in Pittsburgh where she is working towards her Master's in Library and Information Science at University of Pittsburgh.

Poet Wanda Phipps has said of The Second Elizabeth, "Lillis gently unfolds the mystery of how one life touches another and manages to change it. Elizabeth's hot, sticky, and anguished southern summer filled with melancholy and longing brings a glimmer of hope, new love, and rebirth as the second Elizabeth."

Honor Jones (BA, English, Area Program in Poetry Writing, 2008) started in December 2008 as a news assistant for the New York Times Op Ed page.