R. Dwayne Betts Wins 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship

Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10) has been named a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship winner for 2012.  The $15,000 scholarship is awarded annually to five poets between the ages of 21 and 31, to encourage their further “study and writing of poetry.”

The editors of Poetry magazine selected the winning manuscripts from more than 1,000 submissions. In announcing the winners, Poetry senior editor Don Share said, “When Harriet Monroe founded Poetry one hundred years ago, she excelled at discovering and nurturing young poets. I think she would be very pleased with the 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellows.” Editor Christian Wiman added, “The history of Poetry is filled with some of the best-known names in American poetry; my guess is that these young poets will be among those we’ll be talking about in the years to come.”

Other fellowship recipients are Nicholas Friedman, Richie Hofmann, Rickey Laurentiis, and Jacob Saenz.  For more information visit PoetryFoundation.org.

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Because You Have To: A Writing Life

Fiction ’96 alumna Joan Frank‘s new essay collection Because You Have To: A Writing Life will be released September 15, 2012, from the University of Notre Dame Press.

My interest . . . is in the emotional and physical and dream-life of writing (and reading) as an inescapable calling, and in ways of inhabiting that life . . . topics that have often struck me as screened off from the general dialogue, treated as unsavory—like that hidden little back room where the car salesman ducks away, to discuss your proposed purchase price with his “boss.”

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Alumni Updates

Lauren Alwan (Fiction 08): Lauren will be serving as a prose editor for a new online literary journal, The Museum of Americana. The journal is dedicated to fiction, poetry, nonfiction, photography, and visual art that revives or re-purposes forgotten or unknown aspects of Americana.

‘The Museum of Americana…is published purely out of fascination with the big, weird, wildly contradictory collage that is our nation’s cultural history,’ says Justin Hamm, the quarterly’s founder and editor.  ‘We live in an era when it is fashionable to express either apathy or outright disdain for all things American. The museum of Americana was founded on two core beliefs. The first is that there is much to love and celebrate in historical American culture. The second is that, while certainly not all aspects of Americana ought to be praised or celebrated, there is still great value in holding even that which is embarrassing or difficult up to the light to see what it is made of — and what could possibly be made of it.’

The journal will appear four times a year, in February/March, June/July, September/October, and December/January. The first reading period is currently open through September 20th.

To learn more, visit the journal’s website.

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Alumni Updates

Patrick Donnelly (poetry, ’03): Patrick’s diptych, “One and a Half Poems,” appears in the current issue of Plume:

In Which I Explain Why I Set the Fire

AAAWell it began with a microburst from the North when the moon
was hot and bright on the Twenty-Sixth of the Fifth Month.
AAAThe first obstacle that wind met was the top of a White Pine
in the Neighbor of the Right’s yard, which it shoved aslant
AAAthe transformer with a flash, killing the a/c for three days
and spoiling the fish. The Other White Pine, its mate,
AAAthe one I think of as male, didn’t break. But afterward every time
I walked to the mailbox I had to say “One Broken, One Whole,”
AAAand lift my hands over my head, whether I liked it or not...[Keep Reading]…

 

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Alumni Updates

Susan Sterling (fiction, ’92): Susan’s essay “El Pocito” appears in the summer 2012 issue of Under the Sun, a “national literary journal exclusively dedicated to the publication of creative non-fiction.”

To order copies, please visit the magazine’s website.

 

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Short Swimsuits

Seth Pollins’ (fiction, ’09) article, “The Short Swimsuit: A Personal & Historical Account” is up at The Rumpus:

I: Nostalgia

My father wore a short swimsuit. I have a goofy picture of him, circa 1970: he’s on the beach holding his infant son (my brother, Scott), and he’s wearing a short blue swimsuit with white piping and a nifty snap at the waist. This was the Golden Age of short swimsuits—an epoch that lasted into the eighties. As a child, I experienced the end of this epoch. I have a picture of myself, circa 1983: I’m on the beach in Stone Harbor, and I’m wearing a short red swimsuit with a white and blue stripe down the side.

Every summer, my family spent a good two weeks in Stone Harbor—a tradition that spanned my own, and my mother’s childhood. The tradition ended in 1987, the year my parents divorced. That fall, I moved into a small apartment in East Petersburg, PA with my mother and younger sister, Katie. I spent my afternoons, after school, locked in my room, listening to my mother’s Beach Boys albums, and dreaming about summer. My greatest, and only hope, was that my parents might get back together, and this hope was imagined as a return to Stone Harbor.

Even now, as an adult, I comfort myself with Stone Harbor nostalgia. I remember a post-beach meal at Green Cuisine. I was flanked by my mother, my father, and my brother who was holding our baby sister, and before me sat a giant blueberry smoothie. I desperately had to pee, but I just couldn’t bring myself to abandon the table—so I sat, fidgeting, unspeakably happy in my short swimsuit...[Keep Reading]…

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Warren Wilson Alumni in Best New Poets

Warren Wilson MFA Program alumni Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. (poetry, ’09) and Ross White (poetry, ’08) have been selected by Matthew Dickman for the Best New Poets 2012 Anthology.

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., “Albania” (nominated by Beloit Poetry Journal)

Ross White, “Ocean Quahog”

Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr.

Ross White

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RJ Gibson and Mike Puican in Cortland Review

Alumni RJ Gibson (poetry, ’11) and Mike Puican (poetry, ’09) both have poems appearing in Issue 56 of The Cortland Review, complete with audio recordings:

Immersion Method

RJ Gibson

Now that your wife’s moved out
you’ve papered your house, downstairs and up
with yellow Post-It Notes. Each object’s tag bears
its name in French.  You’re living in the world
you know, yes, but also the world you don’t know yet.
Aren’t we all.
Yours is a world where the kitchen range
is powered by gaz. Your cabinets, drawers are full
of fourchettes, couteaux, cups, et cuillères...[Keep Reading]…

When He’s Dead

Mike Puican

he can finally stop wondering whether God exists or if
he’ll ever have the nerve to hug his father. He no longer
has to say, “A part of me feels uncomfortable with the Democrats.”
Finally he can stop thinking about what he should have said
in the custody hearing, how he shouldn’t have been so flip
to the court-ordered psychologist. He can stop daydreaming
about the tree of heaven that grows 15 feet each year
even though the Polish lady cuts it to the ground each spring, …[Keep Reading]…

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Alumni Updates

Faith S. Holsaert (fiction ’82): Faith’s poem “The Flood” appears in the Women Writing Nature issue of Sugar Mule:

The Flood

after Lucille Clifton

We said
it was the tree of life

we thought
rising the new way was not lucifer but venus in the morning caught like a star
in the branches

no …
coiled into the shadow at the trunk’s foot scales
shine like kaddish

and even the
solitary child
the hope of our mornings
is drawn from her book
is walking in the dog hot day
her hair smoothed as if ironed
the hum of cicadas
the two eyes under the foot bridge the corn silk limp
heat lightning
hell sulfur
just as the gob pile gives
the water fills the holler
from enclosing ridge
to enclosing ridge

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Alumni Updates

Catherine Barnett (poetry, ’02): Catherine’s poem “Categories of Understanding” appears as the August 6th edition of Poetry Daily:

I’m studying the unspoken.
“What?” my son asks.
“What are you looking at?”
But there is no explaining,
I can only speak the way light
falls, the way the cotton sheet
lays itself over his sleeping or resting
or dissolving body, touching him with
its ephemera, its oblivion.

Catherine is the author of The Game of Boxes (2012, Graywolf).

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