Lisa Hemminger in the Mississippi Review! Kudos! Cheers!

A giant tip of the hat to Lisa Hemminger, a recent SDSU MFA Poetry graduate and an outstanding member of our faculty, for her publication in The Mississippi Review.

Click the image below to read her most recently published poem


You can always learn more about our cool MFA Program here.

English Department Dean's Award Recipients

Two students from the English Department won Dean’s Awards from the recently 2009 Student Research Symposium, held February 27 and 28 at The Aztec Center. Lisa Hemminger, MFA candidate in Creative Writing, won for her oral presentation "Funny Paper"; and Pierre Lalague, undergraduate English, won for his presentation "Glowing Bones: Art Spiegelman’s Hallucinations in the Shadow of No Towers". MFA Director Sandra Alcosser and Associate Professor Joanna Brooks mentored, respectively. Both students receive a cash prize of $250.

The 2009 Student Research Symposium (SRS), in its second year, featured oral and poster presentations from nearly 400 undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral candidate’s research projects.

Lisa Hemminger in Mississippi Review

We are pleased to announce yet another accomplishment by one of our immensely talented MFA students. Currently working as a part-time writing instructor for the SDSU English Department, Lisa Hemminger is the runner-up for the 2009 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize! The issue featuring work from the contest finalists, including Hemminger's poem "Holy," will be released in early summer.  So, while you're waiting to go out and pick up your very own copy, here's a previously published poem by Hemminger that received a runner-up prize in Opium Magazine's 7-line story competition:

Trans In The Family

The sun is purple leaving the Bluff City Cemetery. My sister oops brother is talking nipples. “Dime-sized or nickel?” A stranger in the truck is nodding his head; obviously an opinion inside. “What does it matter,” I spit, swerving on a bird. “You’ve got a six-pack now. The nipple size won’t matter.” For years, I have been looking at Internet pictures of men’s chests and penises with Eli. One science is more evolved than the other. I tell him the story of me in fifth grade at an Eagle Scout ceremony. In the dark, a cute girl thought I was a boy. I made up a name and a phone number. Mom would have thrown a fit. Now she's part sky, part earth. I guess stranger, son, daughter look the same: flecks of antique gold.