Congratulations to MFA program faculty members C. Dale Young and Pablo Medina, who are among the 181 artists, scholars, and scientists who have just been awarded 2012 Guggenheim Fellowships.
Click here for a full list of recipients.
A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft
ForeWord Reviews‘ Book of the Year Awards were established to bring increased attention to librarians and booksellers of the literary and graphic achievements of independent publishers and their authors. ForeWord is the only review trade journal devoted exclusively to books from independent houses.
Warren Wilson College is delighted to announce the selection of Matthew Olzmann (MFA Poetry, 2009) as the 2012-13 recipient of the Joan Beebe Graduate Teaching Fellowship. Established in 1997, and named for a former Warren Wilson dean, the post-graduate fellowship allows our alumni the opportunity to teach for a year in the College’s undergraduate creative writing program. Watch for an upcoming feature story about Matt on the main Friends of Writers website. We’ll post a link here when that story goes up.
Matthew Olzmann’s first book of poems, Mezzanines, was selected for the 2011 Kundiman Prize and will be published by Alice James Books in April, 2013. His poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review and elsewhere. He’s received fellowships and scholarships from the Kresge Arts Foundation, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. This past fall, he was the Poet-in-residence for the University of Michigan’s Lloyd Hall Scholars Program.
Matthew Olzmann
The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers’ 35th anniversary gala on June 29, 2011 began with a series of three conversations between pairs of veteran faculty and longtime friends. What follows is the full text of the first of those conversations between Robert Boswell and Tony Hoagland; both frequent faculty members over the past couple of decades.
Boz: I’ll go first, because I have a question about influence, and I think that’s a good place to start… Every now and then I’ll read a poem in a magazine and I’ll think that poem’s been influenced by you, so I thought I would have you talk about what that feels like—But first, I thought I’d just credit you for the way I’ve been influenced by you. Some very specific examples: I remember once—right after graduate school, I think it was in Yuma—you read one of my stories, and you said, “Fathers. We’ll be writing about them for the rest of our lives.” And that terrified me so much that I didn’t put a father in a story for the next three years. There were a lot of orphans.
And then there was another time— I had a brand-new used sports car, and I drove over to pick you up, and you walked out into the driveway, and you said, “Dat ist not a car, dat ist a penis.” So I got rid of that car—
Tony: —It wasn’t that fast.
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