As hearts and toes sprint to the sand, the peace of summer reading has also returned. As in the summer of 2022, the UNCW Department of Creative Writing, with its more than 200 books and chapbooks produced by students and alumni, has plenty of suggestions.
Just last year, Nina de Gramont ’06, MFA, had her novel The Christie Affair become an international and New York Times bestseller as well as the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick for February 2022. Already in 2023, Seahawks have had ten books or chapbooks published, with one upcoming:
Daren Dean '03, MFA
Roads
“Fifteen-year-old Dannie Gail Posey is a small-town girl with dreams of escaping her roots on Posey Hill. When the Glencairn Sheriff brings home her now catatonic older sister, Carley, who has fallen victim to abuse by someone in the infamous Lynch family — Dannie’s world is shaken to its core.”
Jennifer Fink '95
Building Boys
“We want to raise well-rounded human beings—we're just not quite sure how best to do it. Teaching boys to respect others will help them in the future but can make life awfully difficult in the here and now. Making the world a safer place for women and girls is not the only reason to rethink our boy raising practices.”
Rory Laverty '07, MFA
Aluminum Alley: The American Pilots Who Flew Over the Himalayas and Helped Win World War II
“For 42 months the American ‘Hump pilots’ flew aviation gas, ammunition, food and other life-or-death cargo from Assam, India over Burma and the eastern Himalayas and into southern China. Aluminum Alley is the true story of an unheralded group of pilots in a cursed and forgotten theater of combat, over the world’s highest mountains and deepest jungles – all to help the Allies defeat Japan in World War II.”
Johannes Lichtman ’12, MFA
Calling Ukraine: A Novel
“Shortly after his thirtieth birthday, John Turner receives a call from an old college friend who makes him an odd job offer: move to Ukraine to teach customer service agents at a startup how to sound American. John’s never been to Ukraine, doesn’t speak Ukrainian, and is supposed to be a journalist, not a consultant. But having just gone through a break-up and the death of his father, it might just be the new start he’s been looking for.”
Jacob Steven Mohr '16, BFA; '16, C
Nightfall and Other Dangers
“Stories of ecstasy and terror, memory and madness. Quietly apocalyptic, intimately brutal, and above all else devilishly frightening, this is the beginning of the Nightfall, from which there is no reprieve of dawn.”
Brenda Nicholas '15, MFA
Day Swallows Night
“The poems in this new collection from Brenda Nicholas are all inspired in one way or another by the works of Navajo artist R. C. Gorman, and it’s a bonus if the reader is led to investigate Gorman’s art through this connection.”
Leah Poole Osowski '06, BA; '14, MFA
Exceeds Us
“Taking its name from a line in Rilke’s second Duino Elegy, ‘For our own heart always exceeds us,’ at its core this is a book about new love and underlying illness. A lyric pursuit of our existence among the natural world, these poems keep in mind that existence is transient.”
Alma Award
Dana Sachs '00, MFA
All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis
“In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement in Europe since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on.”
Jessica Thummel '12 MFA
The View from Jupiter
“Chronicles the lives of four characters (and a group of gossips) who all live in the same high-rise apartment complex. As their journeys unfold, their worlds overlap until an uncomfortable truth (and the answer to a mystery) must be revealed.”
Caitlyn Webber '10, BFA
The Assassin's Sin (The Assassin's Legacy Series)
“Kat wanted the Senior Assassin eliminated-just not yet. Now, Legacy Inc rages forward leaderless, she's locked out of the finances required to keep the assassins in line, and the Senior Assassin's contingency hit list has just been activated-with her name and every other Legacy Blood offering big rewards.”
Emily Paige Wilson '16, MFA
Four Months Past Florence
“The story of Millie Willard, a high school junior from a small, coastal town in South Carolina with dreams of becoming a hard-hitting journalist, despite feeling sidelined in her current position as the weatherwoman for her school’s newspaper, The Bloom. Little does she know, Hurricane Florence is brewing off the coast with plans to change everything.”
Upcoming
Faydra Stratton '03, MFA
Denali Summer - November, 2023
“Accepting a promise ring doesn’t feel like freedom. But there it is, in front of Dawn's face on the eve of high school graduation. While Dawn freaks out on the inside, she goes through the motions on the outside. She and Chris have been together almost three years. Her family--Mama, Daddy and all five of her brothers and sisters--expect them to be together forever, and Dawn’s never gone against expectations.”