Over at Crazyhorse, a new Book Reviews feature was launched this fall. The goal of this new web feature is to promote recent books of poetry and prose coming out of small independent and university presses. Our MFA students are actively requesting review copies (often of past or recent Crazyhorse contributors), and they write the reviews. Nonfiction Editor Lindsey Drager and Managing Editor, Jonathan Bohr Heinen are mentoring students through the drafting process, and each book review has to meet their editorial standards before it goes live on our website.

We are very proud of the first two book reviews: John Byrne on Joshua Mensch’s Because: A Lyric Memoir and Christine McSwain on Eleanor Kriseman’s The Blurry Years. We hope you’ll check these reviews and these books out!

The Charleston City Paper gave a nod to the Gibbes Museum’s recent success with earning a NEA grant to help support the arts education program at Saint John’s High School. Two of our MFA students, Kat Smolinsky and Matt Manco, will be teaching creative writing once-a-week to students in grades 9-12 as part of this program.

The news is spreading about the good work that Prof. Bret Lott and our MFA graduates are doing with students on the other side of the globe. Read about the Bahrain Program in The College Today.