Jack Hazard ‘23 Fellows are writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, or memoir. The $5,000 fellowship is awarded in support of an ongoing project. The goal is to reward and incentivize talented writers who teach in secondary schools. These Fellows are writers who teach, and serve as inspirations to their students, high schools, and communities, and provide a professional model of writers working to find meaning and to create art in chaotic times.

“Scholars say El Salvador”

by William Archila

Scholars say El Salvador fits the cliché of a Latin American country;
broke, pocket-size, but applauded in aristocracy. It’s your typical
banana republic, except there are no bananas, but coffee black & coups d’etats, gangs & fourteen clans. It’s a backyard to big brother. [ . . .]

During the Japanese American internment, Masumoto’s family was separated from a female relative with a mental disability, and after the war, they presumed she had died. Seventy years later, the author—her nephew—discovered she was alive, mere miles from the family’s farm. The startling news inspired this book, which finds Masumoto compelled to seek out his aunt and confront decades of family secrets.

It has rarely ever been a lucrative time to be a writer, yet within every epoch and era, it has always been necessary to write. I first met the writer and poet Marybeth Holleman in the early 2000s through creative writing circles at University of Alaska Anchorage. More recently, beginning around 2016, and thanks to Marybeth’s creative idea and organizational plan, we formed a loose-knit group of seven writers into something akin to a literary salon. For our LitSalon, we sometimes called ourselves the Salonistas. It wasn’t a book club, nor was its purpose to offer critiques or to prop up each other’s work. Our literary salon existed for literary friendship and to discuss, as writers, mostly contemporary work—poetry, nonfiction, fiction—to see what we, as writers, might learn from it. We read and discussed poems, essays, novel excerpts, and rotated meetings in various private homes.

In his new book, the Japanese American peach farmer unearths his family’s painful, hidden history and explores its impact on his identity.

In everything David Mas Masumoto does, from pruning peach trees to shooting the breeze with a neighbor, he’s thinking about legacy. The legacy he’ll leave behind, as a father and pioneering organic farmer, and all of the legacies that have quietly guided him here, to his family’s 80-acre stone fruit and raisin farm just south of Fresno.

Perhaps that’s only natural when one’s work is so steeped in history. Masumoto has spent his career growing (and popularizing) varieties of heirloom fruits that have been around for decades, working the same land as the two generations before him. He’s also documented all of the above in a collection of books, the first of which quite literally served as an oral history for the Japanese American farming community in which he grew up.

Given this interest in preserving history, it makes sense that when Masumoto learned that an aunt his family had long thought dead was still alive, and living nearby, his response was to start documenting her story. In the resulting book, Secret Harvests: A Hidden Story of Separation and the Resilience of a Family Farm, which came out in February, he explores the depths of his family history, uncovering long-held secrets and grappling with impossible decisions made when his family was imprisoned during World War II.

For all that they are meant to – and do – induce a skin-prickling alarm, the fungal zombies that populate HBO’s “The Last of Us” rely on a stunning optical extravagance that announces them as devices of fantasy. In a bout of poeticism suited to its subject matter, “The Last of Us” has revivified the zombie for fans of serialized horror, attaching it to new origins rooted in biochemistry, a new temporal setting that reimagines the past 20 years as dystopic, and something not-so-new – the preoccupation of much of American zombie media with the dissolution of primarily white suburbs and cities. “The Last of Us” is the latest zombie-horror TV showthat allows us to look out on to the marked, magnetic topography of imaginative fiction, but it further distances pop-culture audiences from the distinctly Black source material to which it owes its inspiration – the Haitian zonbi. For many of the Haitians who believe in the existence of zonbi, these figures are as immediate, as personal, as death’s other aspects.

Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand (Red Hen Press, 2023) is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities.

When adoptees search for their birth parents, it’s the pursuit of identity. Where do I come from? Who gave birth to me? What is my medical history?  

AYM guest, Jan Beatty, wanted to know her name – not the one given by her adoptive parents, but the name on her birth certificate. This quest began a decades-long search. An experience documented in her memoir, American Bastard.

The Poetry on the Marquee at the Coast Playhouse came down earlier this week on Monday, February 20, 2023, as the theater gets ready for redevelopment in the near future. Former West Hollywood Poet Laureate, Kim Dower, remembers what it was like to have her words in lights just a few months short of four years.

Poet and urban historian Dolores Hayden reflects on how the dramatic spectacle of early aviation provided a bird’s eye view of 20th-century urban expansion.

an armistice between my dead folks and my delusions

I am a body
of ghost—
haint-kin cloaked
in earthen flesh

Alyssa Graybeal has written this frank memoir about her life with the rare genetic connective tissue disorder Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and its effects on her body, her queerness, her aging, her work, her emotions and her humanity. 

“17 Small Press Books from 2022 that You Might Have Missed” includes Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love by Carlos Allende. “Coffee, Shopping, Murder, Love plays with the tropes of crime fiction by way of two memorable narrators, Charlie and Jignesh. Their connection—at first on an unsuccessful date—is rekindled later, when Charlie is selling a freezer…and Jignesh has accidentally killed a coworker and is trying to cover it up. Allende’s novel has just what the title promises: a lot of fun and a lot of dark humor.”