Announcements


PARTICIPANTS

Kari Fisher won an NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) award to participate in the Hamer Institute Workshop for Community College faculty entitled: “Landmarks of American Democracy: From Freedom Summer to the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike.”

Meghan McClure was one of two finalists for the 2011 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, for her manuscript, The Language of Variables. Read about it here.

Natalie Tilghman (2011) won First Place in Fiction in The Atlantic’s 2010 Student Writing Contest for her short story, “Hidden Pictures.” The results were published in the May 2011 issue.

ALUMNI

Kelli Russell Agodon (2009) Her new book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, has been named Poetry Book of the Year by ForeWord (announced at the recent American Library Association meetings). Read about it here:

Kathleen Flenniken (2007) Her poem, “Horse Latitudes,” published in Third Coast in Spring 2010, won a Pushcart Prize. She would also like to announce her forthcoming book, Plume, has been accepted by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series, and will be published by University of Washington Press in Spring 2012.

Casey Fuller (2009) is the 2011 winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award for his poetry manuscript, A Fort Made of Doors. He won $500 and his book will be published by Floating Bridge in September. Read about it here.

Lita A. Kurth (2009) is now a reviewer for Thereviewreview and has written reviews of Pank and Washington Square. Read them here by typing her last name in the search box.

April Ayers Lawson (2008) was awarded the Plimpton Prize by The Paris Review for her story, “Virgin,” which appeared in its Fall 2010 issue.

Jean A. McDonough (2008) was a finalist for the 2010 Ashland Poetry Press Richard Snyder Publication Prize.

Buzz Mauro (2008) was profiled in the current Willow Springs; read it here.

M. J. Iuppa (2006) was a winner in the GeVa Theater and Writers & Books Two pages/Two Characters play competition. Her play, “Lost Track of Time,” was performed in February 2011.

Ann Whitfield Powers (2007) recently accepted a position as the Executive Director of Fishtrap, a literary arts organization based in Eastern Oregon dedicated to promoting clear thinking and good writing in and about the West. Fishtrap is best known for its summer workshop and gathering at Wallowa Lake each July, but offers many other programs for writers as well. Read about it here. Ann looks forward to involving many RWWers in various Fishtrap events.

Lois Rosen (2010) won second prize in the Oregon Writing Colony’s Elizabeth Bolton Poetry Contest for her poem, “Pantoum for Dorothy at 92,” which appeared in Colonygram, Vol. 26, No. 1, Jan/Feb 2011. Read about it here.

Michael Schmeltzer (2007) won the Spring 2011 Gulf Stream poetry prize for his poem, “Boil.” Read it here and read about his win here. His story, “Autobiography, Autobiography,” won first place in the Blue Earth Review Flash Fiction contest; read about it here. Also, his manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize from University of Arkansas Press. His poem, “Blessing of Scabs,” was a finalist in the 49th Parallel Award (and forthcoming in Bellingham Review).

Anita Sullivan (2008) has started a Poetry Blog at her website and welcomes comments here. She plans to write about poetry as art and craft, beginning with an opening blog that addresses formatting problems poets face in retaining the integrity of line breaks and other text structures when transferring from one medium to another.

Josie Emmons Turner (2007) was appointed Tacoma’s Poet Laureate for 2011-2013. Read about it here. Also, her latest published work was part of the Tacoma 20/20 project, curated by Peter Serko, entitled Tacoma in Images and Verse, which was on exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum in December 2010.

FACULTY

David Biespiel won the 2011 Oregon Book Award for his poetry collection, The Book of Men and Women. Read about it here.

Kevin Clark was named the first Artsmith Artist of the Year by the non-profit literary organization, Artsmith. Read about it here.

Lola Haskins‘ collection, Still, the Mountain, won a silver medal in the 2010 Florida Book awards. Read about it here.

Judith Kitchen‘s essay, “Certainty,” (which she read at last August’s Residency), won a Pushcart Prize. It was originally published in Great River Review.

Brenda Miller received her sixth Pushcart Prize for her essay, “Our Daily Toast,” which appeared in Sweet: A Literary Confection. Read it here.

Marjorie Sandor‘s new memoir, The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction (Arcade Publishing) came out last month; order it here.  Also, the first chapter of a novel-in-progress, The Descent of Luck, appears in the spring 2011 Northwest Review.

Peggy Shumaker is Series Editor for the brand new Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press. The first three titles in the series will be published in spring 2012. Meanwhile, in her travels as Alaska State Writer Laureate, she has been doing workshops, readings, and class visits in Homer, Petersburg, Pelican, Healy, Palmer, Fairbanks, Skagway, Sitka, and Cordova.