Harrison Fletcher’s book Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life is a finalist in the 2013 Colorado Book Awards.
Also, a lyric essay, “The Sorrowful Mysteries,” is a finalist in the 2013 Thomas J. Hrushka Memorial Nonfiction Prize sponsored by Passages North.
Congratulations, Harrison!
David Wojahn has received the Poets’ prize for his book World Tree. The Poets’ prize is awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year. Judging is done by a committee of about 20 American poets, who each nominate two books for the prize.
A reception will be held in May at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City where winners and finalists will read from their award-winning books. David shares the award this year with poet Robert Shaw.
Check out the interview published by VCU News with MFA Faculty fiction writer, Clint McCown, about his latest novel, Haints.
The circumstances of the novel are also the circumstances of my birth. A real-life tornado destroyed my hometown of Fayetteville, Tennessee on leap day, 1952, one week before I was born. Miraculously, only one person was killed . . .
Clint McCown
http://news.vcu.edu/news/QandA_with_Clint_McCown_author_of_Haints
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, author Craig Nova and poet Tom Sleigh will be reading Thursday, March 14th at 7PM in the VCU Scott House. This event is free and open to the public.
Craig Nova is the award-winning author of twelve novels and one autobiography. His next novel, All the Dead Yale Men, the sequel to The Good Son, will be published in 2012. Nova’s writing has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Men’s Journal, among others.
He has received an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005 he was named Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
Tom Sleigh is the author of eight books of poetry, including Army Cats and Space Walk which won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has received the Shelley Prize from the PSA, a Fellowship from the American Academyin Berlin, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund, a Guggenheim grant, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many others. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.
The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, author Ann Hood and poet Catherine MacDonald will be reading on Thursday, February 7th at 7PM in the VCU Scott House.
This event is free and open to the public.
Ann Hood’s most recent novel is The Red Thread. She is the author of the bestselling novel, The Knitting Circle, and the memoir, Comfort: A Journey Through Grief, which was named one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her other novels include: Waiting to Vanish, Three-Legged Horse, Something Blue, Places to Stay The Night, The Properties of Water, Ruby and Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, Her essays and short stories have appeared in Good Housekeeping, The New York Times, Ladies Home Journal, More, Tin House, Ploughshares, and The Paris Review. Ann has won a Best American Spiritual Writing Award, the Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, and two Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and their children.
Catherine MacDonald is the winner of the 2012 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize for her collection Rousing the Machinery (University of Arkansas Press). Her work has been published in Washington Square, Crab Orchard Review, Blackbird, Cortland Review, Louisville Review, and other journals. She has also received scholarships and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Ropewalk, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches writing at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, author Melinda Moustakis and poet Paisley Rekdal will be reading on Thursday, January 24th at 7PM in the VCU Scott House. This event is free and open to the public.
Melinda Moustakis is the author of Bear Down, Bear North: Alaska Stories, which won the Flannery O’ Connor Award and was shortlisted for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize in Writing. She received her MA from UC Davis and her PhD from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in New England Review, American Short Fiction, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She was named a 2011 5 Under 35 writer by the National Book Foundation and is currently a 2012-2013 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee and four books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, Animal Eye, and a hybrid photo-text memoir that combines poems, nonfiction and fiction entitled Intimate. Her work has received a Village Voice Writers on the Verge Award, an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the University of Georgia Press’ Contemporary Poetry Series Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming from The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House, Best American Poetry 2012, and on National Public Radio among others.
The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.
For more information please visit us on the web at http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/graduate/mfa/visiting_writers.htm or call 804-828-1329.
As a part of the VCU Visiting Writers Series, acclaimed poet Stanley Plumly and VCU’s own Harrison Fletcher will be reading on Thursday, October 11th at 7PM in the VCU Scott House. This event is free and open to the public.
Stanley Plumly’s work has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Awards, Pushcart Prizes, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation Award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has taught at many universities around the country, including the Universities of Iowa, Michigan, and Washington; Ohio University; Princeton; Columbia; the University of Houston; and New York University. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at the University of Maryland.
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life. He is a New Letters Literary Award winner, and finalist for the National Magazine Award, Bakeless Literary Prize, Pen Center USA and Santa Fe Writers Project awards. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including New Letters, Fourth Genre, Cimarron Review, Water~Stone Review, and Puerto del Sol. One of his essays, “Beautiful City of Tirzah,” was selected by the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction as among 50 outstanding works since 1970. An MFA graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, he recently joined the creative writing faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University.
The VCU Visiting Writers Series is sponsored by the Department of English of the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences and the Graduate Writers’ Association, with additional funding made possible through the generosity of James Branch Cabell Library Associates, Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU Bookstore, and the family of Larry Levis.
David Wojahn has been awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his book World Tree, voted the Academy of American Poets most outstanding book for 2012. Of the winning book, Linda Gregerson writes:
David Wojahn’s World Tree is a book of consummate vision and artistry. Exquisitely cadenced, politically astute, large of heart, and keen of mind, these are poems of extraordinary moral penetration. They are also a joy to read: David Wojahn is working at the height of his powers.
Congratulations David on this well-deserved honor!
Keith Montesano’s (MFA, Poetry, 2007) second collection of poetry, Scoring the Silent Film, will be published by Dream Horse Press in 2013. New poems from the collection are forthcoming in Nimrod, Bellingham Review, Sonora Review, Sugar House Review, Weave Magazine, and elsewhere. His third manuscript, Sirens and Wildfire, has been a recent finalist for The National Poetry Series and The New Issues Green Rose Prize. He anticipates graduating from Binghamton University in 2013 with a PhD in English and creative writing.
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to host a reading by the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize Katherine Larson (Radial Symmetry). This annual award is given in the name of the late Larry Levis for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, all expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012 to be held at 8PM at the Grace Street Theater. This event is free and open to the public.
Katherine Larson is the author of Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011), selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larson’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to writing, she has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.
This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize two finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).
The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with additional funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.
For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm
The buzz began early for VCU alumnus Kevin Powers’ debut novel, The Yellow Birds, a story of a young soldier’s experience serving in the United States Army during the Iraq War. At the start of 2012, Entertainment Weekly placed the book on its short list of the most promising new novels for the year.
For more information, see this news report.
Amanda Bausch is from Warrenton, Virginia, but lived in Memphis for the past three years to finish her undergrad. She writes songs, plays guitar, and loves singing more than anything. Robert Hass, Mark Strand, Li Young Lee, and Sharon Olds are among her favorite poets.
Justin Belote grew up in New England (New Hampshire during the school year, Rhode Island in the summer). Went to a small liberal arts school in Illinois called Principia College. Now he lives in Seattle. He likes to write (obviously), paint, and philosophical conversations. Other than that he doesn’t really know what to say about himself.
Dale Brumfield has worked as a magazine editor and publisher, technical writer and illustrator in the theme park industry, and as an employee benefits consultant. In 2009 his semi-autobiographical short story collection “Three Buck Naked Commodes: and 18 More Tales from a Small Town” was released. 2010 saw the publication of his first novel “Remnants: a Novel about God, Insurance and Quality Floorcoverings”, and in 2011 published his eNovels “Trapped Under the Pack-Ice” and “Bad Day at the Amusement Park” for Kindle and Nook. His horror novel “Standers” was released nationally March 31, 2012. He has also had short stories published in the horror anthology “Richmond Macabre” and in Spurt Literary Journal. Dale is an arts features writer, cartoonist and opinion commentator for Richmond’s Style Weekly magazine, and since 2010 has won numerous state and national awards for his Arts cover stories, including “Pulp Treasures” and “The Best Worst Movie you Never Saw”. Dale lives in Doswell, Virginia with his wife Susan and three college-age children, and blogs at Newsfromdoswell.com.
Justin Carmickle’s “roots” are in a three-stoplight Indiana town called Loogootee (pronounced low-go-tee) but he spent his formative years in Bloomington, Indiana. At Indiana University he studied Creative Writing, English, and Comparative Literature. His writing is largely informed by themes that have inflected his own life—family, gender, poverty, and sexuality (especially how the lines between heterosexual and homosexual can be/are blurred). As both a writer and reader he is drawn to writings interested in questioning categorical boundaries of gender and sexuality, as well as the ideology of “male” and “female.” Authors he admires are Andre Dubus, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Julie Hecht, and Richard Yates; also, ones from the traditionally marginalized perspective like James Baldwin, Larry Kramer, and Claude McKay. He believe writers should be omnivorous: open to narrative designs that may be as much inspired by film, music, painting, or dance. He also enjoy film, art, comics, music (rock, folk, jazz), theatre, and cooking. When not writing he is absorbed by the chaos surrounding LGBTQIA rights. His favorite films are Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (considered the first gay film) and (currently) the Italian film The Son’s Room. In other lives, he has worked for two years as an intern for the Indiana Writers’ Conference for which he was the judge for fiction scholarships, as a reader for an undergraduate literary journal, and at the food pantry Mother Hubbard’s Cupboard. Recently he published a story in Louisiana Literature.
Taryn Chesshire received her BA in Creative Writing from Texas Tech University in 2008. Transient in nature, she spent the last few years living in various mountain towns of Colorado working hospitality jobs for summer and ski resorts. Technically a fiction writer, she’s also interested in creative non-fiction and exploring the grey area between the two genres.
Christian Detisch was born in Pohang, South Korea and was adopted and raised in Southwestern Pennsylvania. He went to Allegheny College for his undergraduate degree in English with a concentration in Creative Writing and while there was the Senior Managing Editor of the Allegheny Review, a national undergraduate literary magazine. Since graduating he has worked in Meadville, Pennsylvania as an AmeriCorps VISTA with the Housing Authority of the City of Meadville where he coordinates arts-integrated after school programming for kids–and in his spare time he likes running and cooking and the usual distractions.
Leia El-Darwish has a BA in English Lit./Creative Writing from University of Colorado Denver. In 2011, she was one of six winning poets to have a poem displayed in Northern Virginia’s METRO system’s Moving Words exhibit. Her work has also appeared in Copper Nickel and is forthcoming in Blackbird. In the spring of 2012, she served as a semi-finals judge in Colorado’s Poetry Out Loud competition and a poetry mentor to a high school student while continuing to serve as managing editor of Copper Nickel.
Teresa Hudson has lived all of her life in and around Richmond. She received both a BA and Master of Humanities degree from the University of Richmond, and worked for local PBS affiliate WCVE as a producer/director for many years. She has also worked as a caterer, a professional musician, and a music teacher. Teresa spends a lot of time with her husband in Russia but also loves traveling to other places. She also loves rock concerts, beekeeping, gardening, and of course, writing.
Lauren McCarty received her BA in 2009 from The College of William and Mary with a major in English and a minor in Film Studies. She currently lives in Midlothian and works full time for Goodwill of Central Virginia as an IT HelpDesk Coordinator (she tells people to reboot their computers a lot—kidding! Sort of!). She was working on her Masters in English Literature at VCU when she realized she needed to follow her true calling in life, fiction writing.
Lauren Miner is originally from Richmond, Virginia, though she’s tested out a few other cities in her adult life, her favorite being Albuquerque, New Mexico. She got her B.A. in English, with a minor in creative writing, from James Madison University in 2007, and she’s finishing up an M.A. in English research from Virginia Commonwealth University this summer. Lauren has a deep-seated love for both poetry and photography, and she’s writing her master’s thesis about verbal representations of photographic images in the poems of Larry Levis.
Abby Otte is from Winfield, Kansas (no, she’s never walked the yellow brick road and her dog’s name is Lily, not Toto) and she studied English and Journalism at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. A few of her favorite authors: Amy Bloom, Miranda July, and Rebecca Curtis. Rebecca Curtis changed her life last summer when she read her short story “Hungry Self.” She enjoys cooking the occasional meal with a glass of Middle Sister wine because she is a middle sister and it’s her way of consoling herself. She’s in love with KU basketball and for those of you who don’t know, VCU beat KU in the tournament last year and when she decided to go to VCU there was a serious possibility her family and friends would disown her. She took the risk. Also, Bob Dylan is glorious. And olives are not.
Matthew Phipps grew up on the Gulf coast of Florida and studied Creative Writing and Spanish Literature at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He spent a Fulbright year in Chile in 2008 and has lived in Portland, Oregon since 2009. He’s interested in translation and in the formal possibilities of the novella.
Ann Rudy first discovered her love for poetry while growing up on a farm outside of Farmville, Virginia. The works of Whitman and Thoreau in particular inspired her to study creative writing at the University of Virginia. She has had poems published in the Virginia Literary Review and 3.7 Magazine, and has also received an honorable mention for the Poetry Society of Virginia’s 2011 Brodie Herndon Memorial Prize.
The Department of English and the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Virginia Commonwealth University are pleased to announce that Radial Symmetry by Katherine Larson has been selected as the winner of the 2012 Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second book of poetry published in the calendar year 2011. The award is named in memory of the late Larry Levis, the poet who taught at VCU. Larson will receive an honorarium of $2000 and will be brought to Richmond, expenses paid, for a reception and public reading on September 20th, 2012.
Katherine Larson’s Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press, 2011) was also selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Larsen’s work has appeared in AGNI, Boulevard, The Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, and Poetry Northwest, among other publications. She is the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. In addition to her literary career, Larson has worked as a molecular biologist and field ecologist. She lives in Arizona with her husband and daughter.
This year the Prize Committee would also like to recognize the outstanding books of two additional finalists, Anthony Carelli for his collection Carnations (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Brian Barker for The Black Ocean (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).
The Levis Reading Prize is presented on behalf of VCU’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. Sponsors include the VCU Department of English, James Branch Cabell Library Associates, VCU Friends of the Library, the VCU Libraries, the VCU Honors College, Barnes & Noble @ VCU, and the VCU College of Humanities and Sciences, with primary funding provided by the family of Larry Levis.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to all who entered and thus helped to make this annual contest such a success.
For further information about the Levis Reading Prize, see http://www.has.vcu.edu/eng/resources/levis_prize/levis_prize.htm, call 804.828.1329, or contact Katelyn Kiley, Levis Fellow, at kileyk@vcu.edu
Recent MFA grad, Katy Resch, won a $500 artist grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Additionally, her published story, “The Fawn Skull” was selected as a Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2011.