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Poetry Magazine has awarded The J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, endowed since 1994, in the amount of $5,000, to Jamaal May (poetry, ’11) for his poems in the February 2014 issue, “There Are Birds Here” and “Per Fumum.”
Alumna and former Holden Scholar Victoria Chang (poetry, ’05) has been awarded the 2014 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry for her third collection, The Boss (McSweeney’s, 2013). She and the award winners in nine other categories will each receive $1000 and will be honored at the 24th Annual Literary Awards Festival at the Beverly Hills Wilshire on November 11, 2014. The Boss was also awarded a silver medal in the California Book Awards earlier this year.
Brian Blanchfield (poetry, ’99) has been awarded the James Laughlin Award by the Academy of American Poets for his book A Several World (Nightboat Books, 2014). The award recognizes a superior second book of poetry by an American poet.
Brian is the second Warren Wilson MFA graduate to receive this honor. Catherine Barnett (poetry, ’02) won the Laughlin Award in 2012 for The Game Of Boxes (Graywolf, 2012).
Past faculty members who have won the award include Lisel Mueller (1975, The Private Life), Larry Levis (1976, The Afterlife) and Tony Hoagland (1997, Donkey Gospel).
The full announcement can be found online…
A new piece by faculty member Antonya Nelson appears at Tin House:
Last spring, I taught an undergraduate fiction workshop that differed significantly from any other workshop I’ve taught or taken: I tried to have my students mimic the process I go through when writing a story. In most workshops, students are charged with creating two or three short stories in the course of fifteen weeks. But I myself have never written three short stories in a semester—at least, not since graduate school, when I was in a workshop that demanded it of me. I don’t know many writers for whom three stories in fifteen weeks is a habit, but somehow in workshops it’s become the procedure. The fact that that doesn’t replicate my own process seemed sort of weird after a while.
Continue reading online…
An interview with poet Jayne Benjulian (poetry, ’13), entitled “Lifting the Domestic,” appears online in Mother Writer Mentor:
In her review at The California Journal of Women Writers, Benjulian writes eloquently about the ways in which poems about the domestic sphere are overlooked in the contemporary publishing scene.
Continue reading online…
An interview with alumna Joanne Dwyer (poetry, ’09) about her debut book Belle Laide appears at Identity Theory:
Joanne Dominique Dwyer was born in Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY. She has lived in New Mexico for most of her adult life. Dwyer has been published in various journals, such as The American Poetry Review, Conduit, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The New England Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly and others. She received a Rona Jaffe award and holds an MFA from Warren Wilson. Her first book of poems, Belle Laide, was published by Sarabande in 2013.
Continue reading online…
A new creative nonfiction piece by alumna Christine Hale (fiction, ’96) appears online at Hippocampus Magazine:
In the shrine room at the Tampa Dzogchen Buddhist Center, all is familiar and quotidian: dull strain in my low back, noted and dismissed; stinging ache in my hips and knees, a warning I’ve sat too long and will pay with sharp pain when I get up. The pitted pale surface of walls I helped the sangha repaint several years ago remains blank except for dusty sets of framed tangkhas under mildew-spotted glass. The permanent scent of the Center—citrus mold, candle wax, resinous Bhutanese red incense, and dust—envelopes me. Veils of spider web drape the unreachable uppermost corners of the building, once a Cuban dance studio, its still-lustrous hardwood floors a testament to better times in this inner-city neighborhood now griped by dereliction and violence.
Continue reading online…
An interview with alumnus Christian Piers (fiction, ’12) appears at The Writer’s Job:
Many people think of the sciences and the arts as dichotomous, or at the very least, distinctly different career tracks. Do you see or experience any overlap between them?
Yes! At the risk of sounding cliché, I’ve always wanted to be a healer. I just felt like I couldn’t fully live that out as a clinician. If someone came in after their best friend knocked their teeth out, I could use medicine to get them out of pain. I could use medicine to restore their smile. I could use medicine to make that punch look like it never happened—but I couldn’t use it to touch the sort of pain that comes with knowing that the punch didhappen. That’s when I turn to literature.
A new story by alumna Nancy Allen (fiction, ’12) appears online in The Quotable:
Cross-Stitch
In 1951, the “luck of the Lyzens” became a
common saying in Ontario’s Upper Bruce
Peninsula and is occasionally still heard.
Sophia Lyzen lingered—luxuriated—on the floaty edge of wakefulness. Her parents wouldn’t roust her from beneath the down comforter until they’d finished telling each other their dreams. Coffee and dreams: it was ritual. Today the voices from the kitchen were barely audible, were, in fact, whispers. Whispers? Her mother’s words fierce, urgent, then came a big emptiness, tagged by her father’s guttural murmur, and another crashing stream of Ukrainian from her mother.
Leaving her little brother asleep, Sophia climbed out of the warmth.
…
Continue reading online.