A Several World by Brian Blanchfield (poetry, 1999) is among the ten poetry collections longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award. Finalists will be announced on October 15, and the winner will be named at the National Book Award Ceremony and Benefit Dinner in New York City on November 19. Last year’s National Book Award in poetry went to faculty member Mary Szybist, for Incarnadine.
More information here…
A poem by alumnus Timothy Cook (poetry, ’08), “Oracion por Justin Bigos,” appears at The Collagist:
“He was the melting pot, the saucepan
heating marinara for pouring over
ziti & meat that weeks earlier
grazed outside his window. He was tall”
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Alumna Rose McLarney (poetry, ’10) has written about her work for State, the official magazine of Oklahoma State University:
Poetry professor Rose McLarney recently published her second collection of poems,Its Day Being Gone, which won the National Poetry Series. The critically acclaimed collection examines the quality of memory as seen in centuries-old folktales and in how individuals form recollections of their lives. The second-year OSU professor received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Her first poetry collection, The Always Broken Plates of Mountains, was published in 2012. She has won numerous awards and fellowships for her poetry. STATE asked McLarney to write something for our readers about her work. We were delighted to receive the following, which falls somewhere between prose poem and essay.
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Alumnus Nathan Poole (fiction, ’11) has won The 2014 Quarterly West Novella Contest for his novella Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost.
“Benjamin Percy says ‘Pathkiller as the Holy Ghost does not fetishize the past—and so make it feel forged—but instead captures it with naturalism and authenticity that sink the reader back in time.'”
Alumna Lynette D’Amico (fiction, ’13) was a Finalist for the same award for her novella Road Trip.
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The Larry Levis Stipend was established through the generosity of an anonymous donor and named for a beloved member of the MFA Program faculty. The award is given to support a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers who is completing his/her first book. The Levis Stipend alternates between awards for poetry and for fiction, and the 2015 award will be made to a poet. The annual stipend is determined by the income produced by the Levis Fund Endowment during the previous year. This year’s amount will be $4000.
Submissions are currently being accepted until October 15, 2014 Learn how to apply on the Projects and Scholarships page of the Friends of Writers website and any queries or requests for more information should be addressed to Kathy Barham, Levis Fellowship Administrator, [email protected].
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.
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