Alumni news

David Francis (English 2004) is currently a Fulbright fellow living in Bogotá, Colombia and translating into English a book-length collection of poems by the Colombian poet José Asunción Silva. David's Fulbright project had its roots in the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, when he began to write his first translations for inclusion in his honors poetry thesis, Desnudo. In the spring of 2007, he will graduate with an MFA in poetry writing from Columbia University.

Ravi Shankar (English 1994) is Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University. He is the author of a collection of poems, Instrumentality (WordTech, 2004) and is the editor and founder of the acclaimed on-line journal Drunken Boat.

Jynne Dilling Martin (English 2000) is the Assistant Director of Publicity at Random House. She specializes in literary fiction campaigns, and has worked with established literary stars Charles Frazier, Norman Mailer, and Salman Rushdie, as well as young breakout novelists such as David Mitchell, Curtis Sittenfeld and Gary Shteyngart. She also works and travels with the occasional celebrity author including Jane Fonda, Senator John McCain, and Donald Trump. She recently completed a low residency MFA at Warren Wilson and has poetry forthcoming in the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, New England Review and TriQuarterly.

Lindsey Heddleston (English 2003) is working at Court TV and writing for the Hollywood Heat arts and entertainment site; she lives in Brooklyn.

Michael Rutherglen (English 2006) won a prize from the Washington Arts club. He is now a Maytag Fellow in the MFA Program of the acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Kate Megear (English 2003) has been studying both fiction and poetry at the University of New Hampshire where she recently received the Thomas Williams Memorial Award for Graduate Fiction Writing. She will graduate with her Masters in Writing this December.  When not writing she can be found gossiping for long hours on the telephone, interning for the Paris Review, or complaining about the cold weather.

David Martin (English '99) works at Viking Penguin with literary authors such as T.C. Boyle and William Vollman. In the evenings he performs sketch and improv comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. His first book, Officespeak, is a satirical send up of office language and was published by Simon & Schuster in 2005.

Melissa Kirsch (English 1996) has just finished a book, The Girl's Guide to Absolutely Everything (Workman Publishing, November 2006), and will be touring with it this winter. When not working on her own books, she freelances for New York Magazine, Ann Taylor, &c. Here is a description of her new book.

A colossal cheat sheet for your post-college years. Finally, all the needs of the modern girl­from the benefits of a Roth IRA to the pleasure and pain of dating, from figuring out what to wear to a job interview to the delicate enterprise of defriending­ are addressed in one indispensable volume. Here is the perfect combination of solid advice and been-there secrets on every one of life’s conundrums you might confront, all delivered in Melissa Kirsch’s fresh, personal, funny voice, as if your best and smartest friend were giving you the best and smartest advice in the world.

Elizabeth Whelan writes: “After volunteering in Haiti for a year and a half with Partners in Health, I returned to the US unexpectedly in February of this year due to political instability in Haiti. Now I am working in Washington D.C. at the Congressional Hunger Center.”

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