Janan Alexandra:
"My debut poetry collection COME FROM will be published by BOA Editions in April. Here's a little more about the book, which partly emerged from the research and writing I did as an IUMFA student (class of 2021):
In her debut poetry collection, COME FROM, janan alexandra weaves from English into Arabic, exploring the joint projects of longing and belonging.
Part love song for the speaker’s mother, part grief song for ongoing postcolonial loss, this book reaches for, around, underneath, and through language—feeling for its limits and possibilities.
Drawing on both narrative and lyric impulses, alexandra invites readers into a world bristling with family, memory, home, and inheritance—all in the wake of dislocation and fracture. In one section of the book, we follow the speaker “back home” after years of separation; later, we encounter a series of parables in the form of an Arabic abecedarian,
through which the speaker recovers parts of her mother tongue. Here, alexandra probes the gifts and wounds of language, invoking personal and communal histories marked with the longue durée of empire.
To preorder "COME FROM", visit janan's website or her author page at BOA Editions.
To celebrate the release of this work, we'll be having a collaborative/interdisciplinary book launch party at the iFell Gallery on Monday April 28, 2025. The event will feature guest performances by IU Fine Arts Alum Kristy Hughes, local musician and songwriter Logan Boyd Carithers, and our very own Ross Gay. It will also be a potluck! And a conversation
Rae Greiner:
Rae Greiner edited the new Norton Critical Edition of Jane Austen's last completed novel, Persuasion.
Robin Reames:
"I gave an interview with "The Philosopher" for their YouTube series, "The Philosopher and the News" in October 2024. The interview was on my latest book, The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times" (2024).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcq0PQ8Ankc&t=13s"
Samrat Upadhyay
Distinguished Professor Samrat Upadhyay published his new novel Darkmotherland in January (Soho Press). Darkmotherland has been described as a novel of infinite embrace—filled with lovers and widows, dictators and dissidents, paupers, fundamentalists, and a genderqueer power player with her eyes on the throne—in an earthquake-ravaged dystopian reimagining of Nepal. According to the New York Times Book Review, Darkmotherland is “Disturbing and wildly inventive...
The canvas is large, the backdrop colorful, and the subplots proliferate like those in a Dickens novel. The language, meanwhile, is a playful, often alliterative mélange of English, Nepali and street slang reminiscent of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.”
Darkmotherland is A New York Times Editors’ Choice and Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2025
About the author: Samrat Upadhyay was born and raised in Nepal. He is author of the novels The City Son, The Guru of Love (a New York Times Notable Book), and Buddha’s Orphans, as well as the story collections Mad Country, The Royal Ghosts, and Arresting God in Kathmandu. His work has received the Whiting Award and the Asian American Literary Award and been shortlisted for the PEN Open Book Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. He has written for The New York Times and has appeared on BBC Radio and National Public Radio. Upadhyay teaches in the creative writing program at Indiana University.
The College of Arts