Conference alumni have been as busy as ever since our last alumni update in January — earning plaudits and publication around the world.
Beverly Bie Brahic (2009, 2010, 2011) wrote to let us know her second collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the 2012 Forward Prize, the United Kingdom’s top poetry prize. Eavan Boland, who served on our faculty in 2012, wrote of White Sheets, “These poems live and breathe in large subjects – elegies, memories, images. They move easily from urban pastorals to domestic portraits, never losing their blance, always commanding their narratives. This is a book of craft, music and a collected vision of life that provides pleasure on every page.”
Meanwhile, closer to home, David Koehn‘s full-length manuscript, Twine, has won the 2013 May Sarton Poetry Prize. Twine will be published in the spring of 2014. Frequent conference faculty member Arthur Sze wrote, “In taut, fine-spun lines, these poems move through space with insight and verve.” This month, Koehn’s volume of Catullus translations, titled Tunic, is due from letterpress imprint speCt!.
Orlando White (2005) and Santee Frazier (2006) were both named on author Sherman Alexie’s list of top ten Native American poets, which was published online in conjunction with Alexie’s April 2013 interview with Bill Moyers. White’s Bone Light and Frazier’s Dark Thirty, both debut collections, were both published in 2009.
Mari L’Esperance (2010), already a prize-winning poet, edited a collection of non-fiction, Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, which was published this year. The book features appreciations of the Pulitzer Prize winner and U.S. poet laureate as a teacher and mentor. Once and future faculty member David St. John contributed an essay to the volume.
On the fiction side, Elise Winn Pollard (2012) learned in September that she won the Iowa Review Award for “Honey Moon,” which she shared with her workshop at the conference. The story will be published in the December 2013 issue of the Iowa Review.
Fellow 2012 fictioneer Kirstin Chen returned to the conference this year to appear on our debut authors’ panel. Her novel, Soy Sauce for Beginners, is due out in January. Meantime, Chen’s short story, “Foreign and Domestic,” has been published in the fall 2013 edition of Zyzzyva.
Do you have news to share? Drop us a line and we’ll include you in our next update.
