In October, P&W-supported poet April Naoko Heck participated in a group reading at the University of Maryland’s Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House in College Park, Maryland, to celebrate the unique residential program’s tenth anniversary. She blogs about her experience.

“All men want to sleep with supermodels,” reads one poet at the open mic. A fiction writer draws more laughs while describing characters named after A. A. Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh” tales. Another poet talks about a miraculous survivor of bombings at both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet another reader shares a poem about her father, an avid lover of music whose first purchase as a newlywed is a piano—not the proverbial marital bed.

This reading by students, alumni, and staff of the Jimenez-Porter Writers’ House is the culmination of an evening of good eats, speeches, games, and door prizes to celebrate the House’s ten-year anniversary. 

Named after Katherine Anne Porter and Juan Ramon Jimenez, two writers whose literary legacies left lasting impressions upon the University of Maryland, the Writers’ House is a unique residential creative writing program. Founded in part by UMD’s Michael Collier and Laura Lauth, the program’s roughly fifty students study, write, and live under a single roof on campus in Dorchester Hall (a.k.a “Dork-chester,” the inevitable moniker). The current faculty and program director Johnna Schmidt also spend their working and teaching hours in Dorchester Hall. The result: an extraordinarily tight-knit community of students and teachers sharing a singleness of purpose and a passion for creative writing.

Imagine a faculty office located beside the dormitory kitchen, which is next to the student TV lounge, which doubles as the reception hall following public readings by visiting authors. Classroom lessons spill over into passing conversations; the queue for the microwave turns into a discussion about Ginsberg. The House can’t help but become a vibrant community of young writers.

That they are often poring over poems and stories while clad in bunny slippers, or business suits, or soccer gear only adds to the feeling that literature is integrated effortlessly into daily life at the Writers’ House. Creative writing is as essential here as so-so cafeteria meals, raucous Terp football games, and Starbucks runs.

As a former assistant director and instructor (2004-‘07), I arrived too late for the crab rangoon and sushi, but I enjoyed a slab of red velvet cake, catching up with old students, meeting new ones, sharing my poetry, and most of all, cheering on the program’s remarkable ten-year run. The House has flourished through the toughest of economic times—a testament to the University’s commitment to educating young writers.

The day after the celebration and reading, I caught one of the last trains before Hurricane Sandy would close down New York City. As the storm approached, thoughts of the Writers House and its ongoing mission kept me warm and brightened the way.   

Photos: Top: April Naoko Heck reads (credit: Kyle Bodt). Bottom: alumna Jenna Brager (left) and Assistant Director Vivianne Salgado (credit: Kerry Gantt).

Support for Readings/Workshops events in the Washington, DC, area is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C.-based National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) announced the recipients of the 2013 Creative Writing Fellowships. The annual grants, which are given in alternating genres, were awarded this year to poets. Each of the forty fellows will receive $25,000.

The 2013 fellows are: Jose Perez Beduya of Ithaca, New York; Miriam Bird Greenberg of Berkeley, California; Sarah Blake of Havertown, Pennsylvania; Traci Brimhall of Kalamazoo, Michigan; Jenny Browne of San Antonio, Texas; Suzanne Buffam of Chicago; Ken Chen of New York City; Maxine Chernoff of Mill Valley, California; Eduardo C. Corral of Rego Park, New York; Lisa Fay Coutley of Salt Lake City; Meg Day of Salt Lake City; Ansel Elkins of Greensboro, North Carolina; Jill Alexander Essbaum of Austin, Texas; Reginald L. Flood of Quaker Hill, Connecticut; Sarah Gorham of Prospect, Kentucky; Pamela Hart of South Salem, New York; Sy Hoahwah of Benton, Arkansas; Elizabeth Hughey of Birmingham, Alabama; Joshua Kryah of Las Vegas; Rickey Laurentiis of St. Louis, Missouri; Sarah Mangold of Edmonds, Washington; Kerrin McCadden of Plainfield, Vermont; Shane McCrae of Iowa City; Philip Metres of University Heights, Ohio; Simone Muench of Chicago; John Murillo of New York City; Jacob Rakovan of Rochester, New York; Srikanth Reddy of Chicago; Roger W. Reeves of Chicago; James Richardson of Princeton, New Jersey; Rachel Richardson of Greensboro, North Carolina; David Rigsbee of Raleigh, North Carolina; Atsuro Riley of San Francisco; Allison Seay of Midlothian, Virginia; Solmaz Sharif of Los Angeles; B. T. Shaw of Portland, Oregon; Ryan Teitman of Berkeley, California; Sarah Vap of Santa Monica, California; Jake Adam York of Denver; and Rachel Zucker of New York City. 

The NEA received 1,137 eligible fellowship applications this year, which were narrowed down to 110 finalists by a panel of 22 professionals from the literary field. Final selections are made each year by the chairman of the NEA.  

Established by Congress in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts has given more than four billion dollars in grants to individual artists and arts organizations in support of literary, visual, and performing arts. Tuesday’s announcement also named 832 arts organizations—including a number of independent presses, literary magazines, and universities—which will receive 2013 grants through the NEA’s Art Works program.

The application deadline for 2013 translation fellowships is January 3; the 2014 creative writing fellowships, whose deadline has not yet been set, will be given in fiction and creative nonfiction. For more information, visit the NEA website. 

Thomas Lux blogs about his P&W-funded reading with Jon Sands for Page Meets Stage, a reading series in New York City. Lux is Bourne Professor of Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has two new books out this fall—the poetry collection Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) and his nonfiction debut From the Southland (Marick Press).

I’d heard Jon Sands read and perform a few years earlier at Sarah Lawrence College. The budget for readings was always meager and P&W has helped out several times. I believe P&W kicked in for a tribute to Muriel Rukeyser, not long before she died.

Page Meets Stage was started by Taylor Mali and others, several years ago, and was originally called Page Versus Stage. It’s now called Page Meets Stage. “Versus” sounded like an unfair fight to me—page poets are mostly older and would get our asses kicked by the stage poets, who are generally younger, and kick ass anyway, just for fun. So they changed the name. I contend, however, that the people there weren’t concerned with what it was called—they were there for poetry.

I’d read in the program several years before with Marty McConnell, a stunning spoken word/poet, at the storied Bowery Poetry Club, started by Bob Holman, an éminence grise of the spoken word/poet poetry world.

On September 19th, Page Meets Stage held its reading, for the first time ever, at that miracle place, Poets House. It’s in the Battery (as I write this, Storm Sandy is expected to hit the Battery hard) and not too far from Ground Zero. It’s brand new and has two floors filled with poetry books, over 50,000 of them! They also offer many outreach programs and are completely inclusive. They even have sleepovers. Borges said something like: “I can only sleep in a room filled with books.” At Poets House he’d sleep like a big fat baby! It exists, in a nutshell, to serve the art form of poetry. Recently, a student considering taking a class of mine wrote asking for a copy of my syllabus. I wrote back: “Go to NYC, go to Poets House, find the exact center of it, stand there, and turn around 360 degrees. That’s my syllabus.” He responded not.

I often ask Taylor (a premier spoken word/poet): What the bleep’s the difference? Only one, and it’s not even a rule: spoken word/poets tend to memorize their poems. All poets have to write first, on a page, or on a screen, and—this shouldn’t come as a surprise—it’s hard to write well. Page poets give readings; spoken word/poets give readings but tend to call them “performances.” Some stage poets are breathtakingly self-indulgent, some page poets lay on the pseudo-profundity so much I can only hope someday someone translates them into readable English! Taylor usually gives an erudite and nuanced answer to my question.

I still don’t see much difference. It was a larger, younger, more boisterous crowd than the night before at the gallery. Sands is an excellent young spoken word/poet, and his delivery is intense. He leans slightly forward, almost as if he’s walking into a strong wind, and speaks his poems. No histrionics, little body movement—he held the audience with every syllable. We read alternately, trying to bounce poems off each other. It was a blast. Let me put it this way: do not badmouth, or say anything supercilious, around me re: performance poetry. It’s likely I’d fall asleep right in your face.

Photo: Thomas Lux. 

Support for Readings/Workshops in New York City is provided, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, the Abbey K. Starr Charitable Trust, and the Friends of Poets & Writers.

American fiction writer Maggie Shipstead was recently named the winner of the 2012 Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers, an annual award of £30,000 (approximately $48,000) given by the University of Wales to a writer under the age of thirty.

Shipstead, twenty-eight, won the prize for her debut novel, Seating Arrangements (Knopf, 2012). A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, she lives in Coronado, California.

About Seating Arrangements, which turns a satirical eye toward New England wealth and family, author and prize judge Allison Pearson says, “At the age of twenty-eight, Maggie Shipstead has imagined herself inside the head of a fifty-nine-year-old male in the grip of an erotic infatuation. This is territory that has been covered by the greats of American fiction, including John Updike and Jane Smiley. Maggie Shipstead doesn’t just follow in their footsteps; she beats a distinctive and dazzling path of her own. The world has found a remarkable, humane new voice to explain us to ourselves.”

Established in 2006, the Dylan Thomas Prize, one of the world’s largest literary prizes for young writers, is given internationally for a book written in English and published in the previous year. The shortlist for the prize also included Tom Benn for The Doll Princess (Jonathan Cape), Andrea Eames for The White Shadow (Random House), Chibundu Onuzo for The Spider King’s Daughter (Faber & Faber), and D.W. Wilson for Once You Break A Knuckle (Bloomsbury).

Previous winners include Lucy Caldwell for her novel The Meeting Point (Faber & Faber, 2011), Elyse Fenton for her poetry collection Clamour (Cleveland State University, 2010), Nam Le for his short story collection The Boat (Knopf, 2008), and Rachel Trezise, whose short story collection Fresh Apples (Parthian Books) received the inaugural prize in 2006. For more information on the Dylan Thomas Prize, visit the website.