Congratulations to faculty members Lauren Groff and Monica Youn, and to alum Reginald Dwayne Betts, (poetry, ’10) on their 2018 Guggenheim Fellowships! Appointed on the basis of prior achievement and exceptional promise, the successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants in the Foundation’s ninety-fourth competition.
Alan Williamson and his wife, Jeanne Foster, translators, have The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, available now from BOA Editions.
Jeremy Gavron’s new novel, Felix Culpa, will be released in the UK in February. Read an excerpt here.
A poem by Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09), “The Song in Which it Resides” will appear in Ploughshares in January.
Patrick Donnelly (poetry ’03) is the recipient of a 2018 Amy Clampitt Residency Award, which will include a stipend and a six-month stay during 2018 at Clampitt’s former residence in Lenox, Massachusetts.
Robert Oldshue (fiction ’05) has won the New Letters Prize for Fiction 2017 for his story “Thomas.”
Winner of the 2016 Backwaters Prize, Stunt Heart by Mary Jo Thompson (poetry, ’09) has recently been released by The Backwaters Press.
Susan Okie (poetry, ’14) and Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14) have new poems in the new Winter issue of Prairie Schooner. Susan’s poem is titled, “In Great Village,” and Kerrin’s two poems are “When My Brother Dies” and “Killeter Forest: Father McLaughlin’s Well.”
Susan Okie (poetry, ’14)
Kerrin McCadden (poetry, ’14)
A prose piece by Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears in Virginia Quarterly Review Online:“The White Road” by Dan Tobin (poetry ’90) appears in the recent edition of PLUME
I am walking along the dazzling ruin of a road I knew
When I was fourteen, summer, and the days stretch out
Like the road itself, or like that song about a road heading
Somewhere far off into the unseen and the one walking,
Caminante no hay camino, knows he’s come upon his life
Rising up to him in white quartz macadam and heat-haze.
Read the rest of the poem here: THE WHITE ROAD
Daniel Tobin is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Belated Heavens (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry), The Net, and From Nothing, as well as the critical studies Passage to the Center and Awake in America: On Irish-American Poetry. He is the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, Light in Hand: Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge, Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play and The Collected Early Poems of Lola Ridge (Spring 2017). His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Faculty News & Publications
ω Michael Parker has a new book of stories, Everything, Then, and Since, forthcoming in June from Bull City Press.
ω Robin Romm has edited a collection of essays, Double Bind: Women on Ambition, available from WW Norton.
ω A story from David Haynes, “The Weight of Things,” appears in Issue 36 of Natural Bridge.
Alumni News & Publications
“Stolen Boy,” a story from Nancy J. Allen (fiction, ’12), is winner of the 2017 Short Story America Prize. Congratulations, Nancy!
ω Lindsay Remee Ahl (poetry, ’13), has a poem, “The Mother,” in the Spring 2017 issue of The Georgia Review.
ω A collection of poems, Wild Water Child, by Rose Auslander (poetry, ’15), won the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Competition, and is now available for purchase through Amazon. Rose also has a poem, “Dead Moon, Brooklyn,” in Tupelo Quarterly.
ω A collection of poems, The Dangling House, by Maeve Kinkaid (poetry, ’08, is available now from Barrow Street.
ω An essay by Rick Bursky (poetry, ’03) appears online in The AGNI Blog.
ω Dilruba Ahmed (poetry, ’09), has two poems, “The Feast,” and “Choke,” in AGNI, Issue 85, 2017.
ω “Vrbitza,” a poem by Aggie Zivaljevic (fiction, ’05), appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of The Literary Review (TLR).
Congratulations to the following members of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers community on winning 2017 Guggenheim Fellowships:
Faculty
Jennifer Grotz (poetry)
Marisa Silver (fiction; fiction, ’96)
Alumnae
Samantha Hunt (fiction, ’99)
Victoria Chang (poetry, ’05)
Read individual profiles and press releases here.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Rodney Jones, Village Prodigies
♦ Faculty member Rodney Jones’ novel, Village Prodigies, is available now through Mariner Books.
Marianne Boruch, The Little Death of the Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry
♦ The Little Death of the Self: Nine Essays toward Poetry, a collection of essays on poetry by Marianne Boruch, is now available through University of Michigan Press.
Jenny Johnson, In Full Velvet
♦ Jenny Johnson’s (poetry, ’11), debut collection of poems, In Full Velvet, is available now from Sarabande Books.
Nathan McClain, Scale
♦ Scale, the debut collection from Nathan McClain (poetry, ’13), is available from Four Way Books.
Alum Krys Lee’s (fiction, ’08) novel How I Became a North Korean has been released by Viking.
Faculty member Marianne Boruch’s Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing has been released by Copper Canyon Press.
Faculty members Monica Youn’s latest collection Blackacre has been published by Graywolf.
Faculty member Debra Spark’s latest novel Unknown Caller has been published by LSU Press.
Faculty member Alan Shapiro’s latest poetry collection Life Pig is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press later this month. Shapiro also has an essay collection, The Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration, which will be published by University of Chicago Press in October.
Faculty member Jeremy Gavron’s book, A Woman on the Edge of Time, will be published in the US this month. It will have a different subtitle from the UK edition: A Son Investigates His Trailblazing Mother’s Young Suicide. It has also been shortlisted for the 2016 Gordon Burn Prize.
Faculty member Stephen Dobyns’ latest collection The Day’s Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech is forthcoming from BOA Editions later this month.
An excerpt from alum Laura Thomas’ (fiction, ’14) story, “Adult Crowding”, appeared in Synesthesia Literary Journal this summer.
Faculty member Margot Livesey’s latest novel Mercury is forthcoming from Harper Collins later this month.
Alum Laura Van Prooyen (poetry, ’10) was awarded the Writers’ League of Texas 2015 Poetry Book Award for her book, Our House Was on Fire.
Faculty
member Karen Brennan’s latest collection Monsters: Stories is forthcoming from Four Way Books in October.
Faculty member Megan Staffel’s latest collection The Exit Coach: Stories is forthcoming from Four Way Books in October.
Faculty member Peter Orner’s essay collection Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live is forthcoming from Catapult in November.
Alum Laura Swearingen-Steadwell (poetry, ’14) received the 2016 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for her second book of poems, All Blue So Late: A Collection of Poems, selected by Parneshia Jones and Jacqueline Jones LaMon.
An interview with faculty member and alum (poetry, ’09) Matthew Olzmann appears at Panhandler Magazine:
Katherine Masters: How do you begin a poem? Is it a matter of inspiration, is it something you set out to do with a chosen theme, or is it both?
Matthew Olzmann: It’s very rarely a matter of inspiration. I try to write a little every day, and that quickly wipes out your reservoir of backup ideas. Often I sit down, unsure what I’m going to write. I like writing just for the process of writing. I like the way it makes me slow down and think something through. Sometimes it’s just writing out thoughts, writing a scene, writing a sentence, and then if something sparks or seems promising when I return to it, then that’s when the real work often begins: revising and developing the idea. I think C. Dale Young once said that drafting a poem is like an artist gathering materials, but revising a poem is an artist shaping the materials. So the poem truly begins in revision, when I have something that I want to try to expand and develop.
Continue reading online…
A poem by faculty member and alum Matthew Olzmann (poetry, ’09) appears at the Kenyon Review:
Regulations allow for, on average, sixty insect fragments
per hundred grams of chocolate
in America. You are pulverized.
The thorax, the head, the legs that no longer twitch.
Invisible and milk-smooth.
Nothing harbors a secret like sweetness.
Continue reading online…
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