Quarterly Digest of Awards and Books
Faculty member Dominic Smith‘s new novel The Last Painting of Sara De Vos is receiving fantastic reviews from a number of outlets, including the New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, and the Boston Globe: “Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, ‘The Last Painting’ is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart.”
Alum Nan Cuba (fiction, ’89) won a prestigious Dobie Paisano Fellowship (previous recipients include Sandra Cisneros and Stephen Harrigan) and will live for six months (February-August 2016) on the 250-acre, J. Frank Dobie ranch outside of Austin, where she will work on a “tragicomic novel in the vein of a Coen brothers movie.”
Bastards of the Reagan Era by alum Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) won the 2016 PEN/New England Award, selected by Mark Doty, who said of the collection: “These poems of sorrow and slow-burning fury hold, at their core, the deepest love for the erased and the discarded. Betts has written an indelible lament for a generation, a necessary book for this American moment.”
Alum Brian Blanchfield (poetry, ’99) is a 2016 Whiting Award winner for non-fiction and has his first book of prose, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing, out from Nightboat Books this month. The collection includes 24 single-subject essays, “part cultural studies, part (dicey) autobiography.” From the Whiting Award citation: “The quiet but searing vulnerability in Brian Blanchfield’s writing is as wide and trembling as the wingspan of his otherness. He writes with a beguiling sagaciousness that made me bow my head so many times that I lost count.”
The short story “Heishe” by alum Nancy Allen (fiction, ’12) appears in StoryQuarterly 49, The Literary Magazine of Rutgers University-Camden.
A short story titled “Adiós and Adiós,” by alum Patricia Grace King (fiction, ’13) has recently been published in the Winter 2015 issue of The Gettysburg Review.
Two poems from alum Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13) appear in the March/April issue of Women’s Review of Books and are accompanied by a post in Women = Books, the Women’s Review of Books blog.
