alumni

Post-Slash Pine:
(what former interns are doing now)

Featured alums: Natalie Latta, Meg Brandl, Amanda Moore, Danie Vollenweider, Glynnis Ritchie, Jake Smith, Lauren Barletta, Mary Elizabeth Adams, Lauren Adams, Lauren Gail Smith, Emma Fick, Parker White, Mo Fiorella & Mia Bass.

Mia Bass
“In the fall of 2012, I will be serving as a high school ESL teacher in inner-city Kansas City through Teach for America. Slash Pine provided me with multiple leadership opportunities that led to real life experiences I was able to draw on throughout the TFA application and interview stages. Slash Pine brought together this idea of engaging community arts as a way of bringing people together, which is the same mindset I hope to bring to Kansas City. If anyone is considering teaching or Teach for America, don’t hesitate to contact me at miacbass@gmail.com.” 

Mo Fiorella
“In my two semesters as a Slash Pine intern, I had the opportunity to help design, produce, and bind a chapbook and to promote the SP Writers’ Festival. Now, I am pursuing my M.F.A. in book arts here at UA, as well as exploring the worlds of marketing, management, and curating through some very different outlets. SP may not have introduced me to the idea of community arts, but it serves still as a platform in which to view how community arts outreach and happenings work in places like Tuscaloosa. Throughout my undergraduate experience, I focused on how people and places interact and I continue to do so, with my SP experience added to the mix, and those ideas often coming out in my creative work.”

Jake Smith
“I was a 3rd semester intern with Slash Pine Press, from its inaugural class through the Spring of 2011. Among other things, I led one of the groups on the 3,4,5,6 Writer’s Hike through Sokol Park for a 45-minute silent trek. I am currently working on a paper with Joseph Wood concerning my involvement in the hike and the hike itself. My experience will serve as a microcosm in which we examine poetry in relation to community, domain, authority, authenticity, memory, and spaces shared and private.

Slash Pine has afforded me some of the best opportunities to meet people who, by turns, impressed and engaged me. This network of poets, scholars, and just reg’lar ol’ people are the foundation a community, without which “community arts” is irrelevant. Other concepts I’ve embraced during my time at Slash Pine:

1. People will show up if you put on an event. Someone will come.
2. Do something that you want to do. By the same coin, you have to want to do something.
3. Slash Pine is two words.

I’ve swum in the Cahaba River; convinced someone to yell poetry from a creek bed forty feet away; traveled to Athens, Georgia and saw my TA tell some heckler that he was, in word and deed, something rather unpleasant; eaten free pie (pizza or pastry). All as part of a community, if not “the community.”

I’m seeking a community development degree from Vanderbilt. Or I’m teaching English in Asia. Or I’m relocating to New Orleans for business and pleasure.”

Parker White
“I currently work for the Birmingham non-profit, anti-poverty organization Impact Alabama, through which I coach a debate team of Birmingham City high school students, manage a free tax preparation site in Montgomery, and screen children throughout Alabama for vision problems. Additionally, I edit the organization’s blog, host a podcast, and research, edit, and write press releases and grant proposals. I came to Impact through a commitment to community service instilled in me during my time at the University of Alabama.

Slash Pine played an integral role in my undergraduate experience as it strongly supported my independence, creativity, and leadership. As one of the original members of the press, I participated in 2010 and 2011 writer exchanges with the University of Kansas and the University of Georgia, coordinated and led the 2010 poetry hike at Sokol Park, assisted in the publication of several poetry chapbooks, and edited a documentary of the 2010 Cahaba River Reading. Slash Pine connected me to like-minded creative thinkers, writers, and publishers throughout my university and throughout the country, but more importantly it exposed me to the many and significant ways in which creative writing itself connects to the social, professional, and cultural aspects of our lives. In 2011 I was honored as a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship, a distinction that I would not have achieved without the innovative and analytical perspectives I gained during my time with Slash Pine.
After Impact, I plan ro either pursue a career in public media, apply for a PhD in Beckett studies, join the Peace Corps, or do something else. I will be writing regardless. Long live Slash Pine.”