2025 Alumni Roundup
Alumni Authors Roundup!
We are thrilled to spotlight several brilliant Epiphany authors who published book-length works last year: Ruth Awad, Rhoni Blankenhorn, Nick Fuller Goggins, Thea Matthews, Leigh Sugar, Terese Svoboda, and Marianne Villanueva. Each of the aforementioned writers’ work previously found a home in our pages, and we are so thrilled that more readers now have the opportunity to be enthralled by their words.
Ruth Awad, who served as Guest Poetry Editor at Epiphany in 2019 and whose poem “Interview with My Father: Names” was featured in our Spring/Summer 2013 Issue, published her sophomore poetry collection Outside the Joy with Third Man Books last year. In crystalline prose, Awad’s poems explore the themes of grief, love, and resilience in the face of personal loss and environmental catastrophe. Outside the Joy received a starred review from Publishers Weekly and was praised as a “deeply felt collection” in which “the hurt—and Awad’s bravery in facing it—(...) lends [the] poems their remarkable power and vividness.” Matter News similarly applauded the collection, noting that “part of the tension and the beauty in Outside the Joy comes from the tug that exists between these mounting catastrophes both global and personal.”
Thea Matthews, whose poem “Dez” was included in our Summer 2023 Issue, published her second poetry collection GRIME with City Light Books. Hailed by Publishers Weekly as a “memorable and elegiac ode to family and place” and one of their Most Anticipated Poetry Books for Fall, GRIME probes the shadowy underbellies of both the city and the self. Set in the San Francisco Tenderloin, GRIME wrestles with addiction, grief, gentrification, police brutality, family dysfunction, and self-actualization in evocative poems that push the boundaries of form. Excerpts from the collection were featured in The Atlantic and ZYZZYVA, including “At a Family House Party in San Jose, California” and “Essay on Deprivation,” respectively.
Terese Svoboda, whose flash fiction, “The Red and Purple Bulbs,” was featured on the Epiphany website in August 2022 and whose genre-bending works over the last five decades have earned her a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, published her second memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, with OR Books. In this genre-bending work, Svoboda combines intimate personal reflections with meditations on her mother-in-law, Pat Lochridge, the only female journalist to cover both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of WWII. In so doing, she considers the elusiveness of memory and truth and interrogates the significance of the stories we tell others and ourselves. Hitler and My Mother-in-Law was lauded by Kirkus as a “poetic reimagining of a pathbreaking female reporter in a man’s world of war” and described by Publishers Weekly as “canny, meandering, and revelatory.”
Leigh Sugar, whose poems “At the Yoga Commune” and “Missed Connections Poems” were originally featured in our Summer 2022 Issue and on our website, respectively, published her debut poetry collection, Freeland, with Alice James Books. An Alice James Award and Jake Adam York Prize Finalist, Freeland probes the limits of language and form in an attempt to render the harrowing realities of mass incarceration in the U.S.. In an interview with Leigh Sugar for Electric Literature, Jiordan Castle commended Sugar’s “narrative, lyrical, and structurally experimental poems” which “offer a rare, nuanced take on the prison landscape as only one intimately acquainted with it can.” Edward Hirsch described Freeland as a “haunted and haunting book that won’t let you look away” while Idra Novey praised it as a “vibrant conjuring of a kinder, wiser world” teeming with “generosity of spirit.”
Nick Fuller Goggins, whose poem “All Mammals in This Hall Share a Common Ancestor” was originally featured in our Fall/Winter 2019 Issue, published his second novel The Frequency of Living Things with Atria Books. This timeless, poignant novel follows sisters and bandmates Josie, Emma, and Ara as Ara is suddenly arrested, forcing them to grapple with longstanding familial tensions as well as their own desires for self-actualization. The Frequency of Living Things received positive reviews from both Kirkus and Fresh Fiction. Kirkus called the work a “painful, but also drolly original, excavation of family trauma through the perspectives of three sisters and their old-school activist mother” while Evie Harris at Fresh Fiction described the novel as a “skillfully told, moving, and poignant” story about “the power of family.”
Rhoni Blankenhorn, whose poems “Flat Bells,” “Holy Cross Cemetery,” and “Spinario” were featured in our Fall/Winter 2024 Issue, published her debut poetry collection Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet with Trio House Press. Awarded the 2024 Trio Award, Rooms for the Dead and the Not Yet challenges deeply-rooted dichotomies between the dead and the living, the past and the present, mourning and longing. In so doing, she highlights the liberatory potentiality of storytelling and calls on readers to embrace the idiosyncratic complexity of the human experience.
Marianne Villanueva, whose first short story collection, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila, was a finalist for the Philippines’ National Book Award and whose short story “Night, Ocean” was featured in our Fall/Winter 2024 issue, published her fourth short story collection, Residents of the Deep, with Unsolicited Press in August 2025. Villanueva’s haunting, surrealist stories conjure post-apocalyptic landscapes, mythical encounters, and deep-sea cities. In so doing, she explores human resilience in the face of adversity and challenges readers to confront the things that lurk in the depths—of the ocean and of themselves.
— Audrey Kelly, Epiphany reader
