"I didn't really get interested in poetry until I got here," explains author and Augustana College alumna Farah Marklevits, during a recent interview on the school campus. "I went on a Latin American term, and we read Pablo Neruda in Chile at, like, his house, which is on the coast. And it just captured me. We're in Chile, and there's the ocean, and the professors had a copy of his poems, and they were reading them, and it was just like ... wow."

Less than a decade after Marklevits' 1999 graduation, it's now her readers who are saying "wow."

Peter Quinn studied for a doctorate in history that he never finished, and his literary career - which overlaps with three decades as a political and corporate speech-writer - retains a deep curiosity about the past.

But it's not only history of the verified, annotated variety; it is history also imagined and remembered.

Stacy A. Cordery didn't want to rescue Alice Roosevelt Longworth from her reputation.

Freelance writer Felicia Schneiderhan - the Midwest Writing Center's artist-in-residence beginning March 1 - is currently at work on a nonfiction book detailing her first married year with husband Mark. The endeavor, which focuses on the Chicago author's adjustment to her new home, is still only in rough-draft form, yet you can likely get a sense of the finished piece by visiting (http://lifeaboardmazurka.blogspot.com) and reading the entries that are flush with Schneiderhan's newlywed spirit, including "Peeing in a Bucket," "Why Our Shit Don't Stink," and "You Want to Put It Where?"