We want to hear about your exciting news and career updates. Please reach out to assistant professor, SJ Sindu, Ph.D., at sathiyaseels@vcu.edu.

Student Spotlights

Trey Burnart Hall

Hall’s essay, “Silo Tree on Catawba Road,” was published in Cold Mountain Review.

Josh Holm

Holm’s “Four Poems” was published in the New Letters Summer/Fall 2025 issue.

Anna Leonard

Leonard’s poem entitled, "I don't know how an overdose works," was published in Southeast Review in November, and another poem of the same title is being published in Frontier Poetry in June 2026. Another poem, "Learning of the Death of a Classmate," will be published in The Florida Review in April 2026 as part of their April National Poetry Month selections.

Leonard’s first full-length album is shortlisted for the 2026 Newlin Music Prize.

Matthew Schroeder

Schroeder’s poem, "Elegy Containing the Weight of Miracles", was selected in February 2026 as the first place winner in the Southeast Review's Gearhart Poetry Contest. The announcement will be published in the Fall 2026 issue.

Alumni News

Craig Beaven (M.F.A.’04)

Beaven's fifth book of poetry, “Request to the God Trinket,” won the 2025 Orison Press Poetry Prize, judged by Phillip B. Williams.

Dina Folgia (M.F.A.’25)

Folgia was recently hired as an instructor for Intro to Creative Writing at the College of William & Mary.

Her debut poetry collection “Lucky Vessel: Poems and An Excerpt from In Every Possible Universe,” was longlisted for the YesYes Books Open Reading Period in Poetry

Folgia recently published her poem, “Time of Death,” in Salamander Magazine and her poem, “90% Dark,” in Four Way Review. Her forthcoming poem, “Stargazer,” will be published later this year in Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal.

Folgia received a poetry scholarship from The Kenyon Review’s Winter Online Writers Workshop.

Anna Journey (M.F.A.’07)

Journey is the author of five poetry collections, including “Wolf Cut: New and Selected Poems,” forthcoming from LSU Press on July 21, 2026. Her recent poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere.

Biljana Obradovic, Ph.D. (M.F.A.’91)

Obradovic recently published her fifth poetry collection, “Called By Distances,” through LSU Press.

Cheryl Walsh (M.F.A.’98)

Walsh’s short story "Reunion Fragments" is forthcoming in SHIFT Literary Magazine's next issue: SHIFTing Supernatural: The Spooky, the Spectacular, and the Somewhat Strange.

Jamie L. Walters (M.F.A.’24)

Walters’ essay, “Old Flames,” from her master’s thesis, was selected for publication in Ploughshares.

Allison Weissman (M.F.A.’25)

Weissman’s essay “Ghost Girl at the Genetti Hotel” was published in the New Letters Summer/Fall 2025 issue.

Diana Woodcock (B.S.’74, M.F.A.’04)

Woodcock's eighth poetry chapbook, “Dark Flowers and Survivors,” was published in March 2026 by Dancing Girl Press & Studio.

Faculty Updates

Geoff Bouvier, Ph.D.

Dr. Bouvier's recent book, “Us From Nothing,” was a Medal Provocateur Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and one of the poems from the book was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Us From Nothing” was also reviewed favorably in the L.A. Times Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Edgar Kunz

Kunz served as a Casa Ecco Fellow with the Hawthornden Foundation in summer 2025, which included a six-week residency on Lake Como.

The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day will publish Kunz’s newest poem, edited by Hala Alyan, in May.

Sonja Livingston

Livingston’s essay, “Joseph the Worker,” which appeared in Prairie Schooner (2024/2025), was selected for a 2025 Virginia Faulkner Prize.   

Livingston’s essay, “How to Read Your Work Aloud,” won the sixth annual Writer’s Digest Personal Essay Award, which includes a monetary prize and publication in the May/June 2026 issue of the magazine.

Jessica Hendry Nelson

Nelson’s latest book, “Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief”, won the AWP Sue William Silverman Prize in Creative Nonfiction and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

Nelson was awarded a fellowship residency from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts.

Nelson will judge for North American Review’s 2026 Terry Tempest Williams Creative Nonfiction Prize. The deadline to submit is April 2, 2026.

Nelson will publish essays in two anthologies in 2026: “'The Plan' in Between Our Legs: Silence-Breaking Personal Narratives on Gynecological Health," edited by Caroline Beuley and Justine Payton; and “Letter to Eric” in The Essay Form(s), edited by Jill Talbot of the Columbia University Press.