Poets & Writers Blogs

This past May it was announced that the prestigious Orange Prize for Fiction would no longer be sponsored by its longtime partner, the telecommunications company Orange. Over the weekend, the prize’s cofounder and honorary director, novelist Kate Mosse, announced that a new sponsor for the prize would soon be selected.

Since news broke of the partnership’s end, eighteen different companies have expressed interest in taking over sponsorship of the new Prize for Fiction. “It’s been incredibly exciting,” Mosse said at a conference in England on Saturday. “We’ll be making a choice in the next week and announcing in September.”

Orange has sponsored the U.K.-based prize—which annually awards thirty thousand pounds (approximately forty-seven thousand dollars) to a woman writer for a novel written in English—since it was founded in 1996. Of the former sponsor Mosse said, “Our partnership has delivered everything—and more—than we hoped for. A celebration of international writing by women, one of the most significant arts awards in the U.K., and also a major force in education, literacy, and research.”

Madeline Miller won the 2012 prize for her novel The Song of Achilles (Ecco, 2011). The finalists were Esi Edugyan, Anne Enright, Georgia Harding, Cynthia Ozick, and Ann Patchett. Previous winners of the prize have included Téa Obreht for The Tiger's Wife (Random House, 2011) and Zadie Smith for On Beauty (Penguin, 2005).

In the video below, Madeline Miller discusses her winning novel.

For the past seven years, Nancy Kline has been leading P&W–supported senior writing workshops at Queens Community House in New York City. Her short stories, essays, literary criticism, and translations have appeared widely. She is the author of the novel, The Faithful, and edited and contributed to the essay collection How Writers Teach Writing. She also reviews regularly for the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Kline generously shared with us reflections on her writing workshops with seniors.

What makes your workshops unique?
It’s the students who make my workshops unique—their jokes, epiphanies, reticencies, and idiosyncrasies; their chemistry with each other, with me, and with words. 

Could you share a few examples of stories written in your workshop recently?
In one workshop, we used pieces from Flash Fiction Forward as springboards into workshop participants’ own work.

Rick Moody’s “Drawer” inspired a hilarious description of the anarchic contents of one writer’s drawer and her increasing hysteria as she searched through it for some coveted item.

In response to the prompt "just like her mother," suggested by Pamela Painter's "Toasters," one workshop participant wrote about how, as a small child, she accompanied her mother to forage secretly for an apronful of grain with which to feed her starving family in decimated, post-World War II Germany.

Rob Carney's “Traveling Alone” inspired one eighty-six-year-old student's biblical monologue. When asked what she planned to write about next, having just done God, she replied: “Sex.” And so she did.

What techniques do you employ to help shy writers open up?
In my experience, all writers are shy, at least on some level. We are naked in the page. For this reason, I try to establish a respectful, attentive environment in my writing workshops. Laughter helps.

I try to teach students to listen to their readers’ comments, without defensiveness or undue docility, and to comment on other people’s work with rigor and charity; to write any written comments in pencil, rather than pen; and to try to phrase their comments as questions, rather than statements. 

There’s a difference between asking a writer "Could you clarify this?" and stamping a text "Unclear." The former recognizes that the writer is in charge of her own words and has the power to change them. The latter suggests, to my ear, that the reader is in charge and the writer has failed.

What has been your most rewarding experience as a teacher?
It is always that moment when a student gets it, whatever it happens to be. Sometimes a writer who has been struggling with constricted prose suddenly writes in a text so lush and genuine that the workshop falls silent in admiration. Smaller epiphanies occur: During a recent session on comma use, one of the seniors exclaimed, “Commas actually communicate information! I never knew that!” This was thrilling.

What affect has this work had on you?
It is deeply moving to be in the presence of the accumulated wisdom, imagination, and courage of the women and men with whom I’m working. Four of my students have died since I began to offer these workshops. Their deaths have marked me and their colleagues, and have underlined the collective sense that each of us has many stories to tell, and that we had better hurry up and tell them.

Photo: Nancy Kline. Credit: Adam Piore.
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 Department of Cultural Affairs, with additional support from the Louis & Anne Abrons Foundation, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the A.K. Starr Charitable Trust, and Friends of Poets & Writers.

Last week, the Hurston/Wright Foundation announced the nominees for the eleventh annual Legacy Awards, given to writers of African descent for books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction published in the previous year.

The 2012 nominees in poetry are Aracelis Girmay for Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions), Evie Shockley for The New Black (Wesleyan University Press), and Tracy K. Smith for Life on Mars (Graywolf).

The nominees in fiction are Nuruddin Farah for Crossbones (Riverhead), Tayari Jones for Silver Sparrow (Algonquin Books), Helen Oyeyemi for Mr. Fox (Riverhead), Danzy Senna for You Are Free (Riverhead), Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury), and Colson Whitehead for Zone One (Doubleday).

The nominees in nonfiction are Tomiko Brown-Nagin for Courage to Dissent (Oxford University Press), Melissa V. Harris-Perry for Sister Citizen (Yale University Press), Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts for Harlem is Nowhere (Little, Brown), Binyavanga Wainaina for One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf), and Mark Whitaker for My Long Trip Home (Simon & Schuster).

The winners will be announced later this fall and honored at the annual Legacy Award ceremony on December 1 in Washington, D.C.

The Bowie, Maryland-based Hurston/Wright Foundation—named for writers Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright—is a national resource center for writers, readers, and supporters of African American literature. Founded in 1990, the Foundation’s mission is to “discover, develop, and honor Black writers” at every stage of their writing career. In addition to the Legacy Award, the foundation offers a variety of literary programming, including awards, workshops, and residencies for African American high school and college students, and awards for businesses, educators, and community leaders that have demonstrated a commitment to African American literature.

The foundation’s board of directors and advisory board are comprised of writers and other members of the literary community, including Chinua Achebe, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Terry McMillan, Toni Morrison, and E. Ethelbert Miller.

The 2012 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose sponsored by Gulf Coast magazine, is currently accepting submissions. Ander Monson, editor of the literary journal DIAGRAM and New Michigan Press, whose most recent books include Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir (Graywolf, 2010) and The Available World (Sarabande Books, 2010) will judge.

Writers may submit up to three pieces of prose poetry, flash fiction, or micro-nonfiction of 500 words or fewer, along with a $17 entry fee, via the online submission system or by mail. The deadline for submissions is September 1.

Established in 2008, the annual prize offers $1,000 and publication in Gulf Coast. Two honorable mentions will also receive publication. All entries are considered for paid publication on the website, and entrants receive a one-year subscription to Gulf Coast.

Last year's winner, selected by Sarah Manguso, was Erica Olsen for "Grand Canyon II," which can be read on the Gulf Coast website.

Gulf Coast, a journal of literary and fine arts, is housed within the University of Houston’s English department. Founded by Donald Barthelme and Phillip Lopate 1983, the student-run journal publishes original work in both its print publication—which comes out in April and October each year—and on the website.

P&W–sponsored poets Mary Fitzpatrick and Judith Pacht were among the writers who performed June 3 at Lummis Day, an annual festival celebrating journalist and activist Charles Fletcher Lummis and Northeast Los Angeles. P&W intern David Chun reports.

Held on the lawn of the historic Lummis Home, El Alisal, the Sunday morning poetry reading at the Seventh Annual Lummis Day drew a friendly audience of families, students, and seniors from diverse backgrounds. A jazz duo set a peaceful counterpoint to the stream of traffic on the 110 freeway rushing by behind the property’s sycamores.  

Chumash storyteller Ted Garcia opened the reading with a traditional blessing, thanking the Creator for our safe travels, our elders, our children, and all that we have. The poetry program included Suzanne Lummis (Charles Fletcher Lummis’s granddaughter), Mary Fitzpatrick, Judith Pacht, Jeremy Radin, and Hector Tobar. All are Angelenos whose work confronts human responsibility in the environment, an issue close to Charles Lummis’s heart. But the diversity in the writers’ styles was a true celebration of Los Angeles literary culture.

Any audience members expecting banal praises of California sunshine had their eyes opened when Suzanne Lummis kicked off the reading with “Gone Baby,” a poem which she described as a fairy tale for the children of the economic collapse. The poem worked as both a eulogy for the golden age of economic prosperity in America, and a prayer of hope for recovery.

Mary Fitzpatrick elegantly flipped from ironic meditations on the innocence of young love to a scathing review of the social masks so normal to Angeleno life. Her poem “Pompeii” concluded with a question: Is our culture evolving, or are we as trapped in artifice as the civilization of Pompeii after the historic volcano eruption encased it in stone?

Judith Pacht’s reading whisked the audience away on a dizzying tour of desert life, then zoomed in on an asphalt parking lot built among the ancient sands “like a buckled mirror [that] twists and distorts.”
 
A highlight of the morning was a surprise reading from poet Jeremy Radin (filling in for Ilya Kaminsky). His poems “Off Switch” and “Slowdance With Sasquatch” navigated the subjects of parenting and beauty with humor and dark tinges. The audience laughed, contemplated, and applauded. He closed with “The Last Invitation, September 5, 1895,” a piece adapted from historical correspondence between President Teddy Roosevelt and a pig farmer whose stock was so often killed off by bears that he arranged annual bear hunts with the president to get revenge. The farmer pleaded: “bears don’t die like other animals. When the knife bites / into their pulse, you can see them understand.” By the conclusion of the poem, the speaker is wary of the country’s mad rush for private property and subsequent disregard for nature.

Hector Tobar’s excerpt from his novel The Barbarian Nurseries delighted the audience with its meditation on the funny and often painful differences between Mexican and American views on everything from party etiquette to the homeless. 

Suzanne Lummis closed the reading with a heartfelt reminder of the importance of good books in the home. Then the audience made their way across the arroyo, where they enjoyed the live local music and fresh food.  

Photo: Mary Fitzpatrick reads at El Alisal. Credit: Eliot Sekuler.
Major support for Readings/Workshops in California is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

Philadelphia’s Pew Center for Arts & Heritage has announced the recipients of the 2012 Pew Fellowships in the Arts. Thirteen artists from the Philadelphia area, including two poets, will each receive a $60,000 grant.

Poets Catie Rosemurgy and Kevin Varrone, both of Philadelphia, have been awarded the fellowships in the literature category. The “no strings attached” grants, distributed over a one- to two-year period, are given to help writers and artists advance their work. Rosemurgy is the author of two poetry collections, The Stranger Manual (2010) and My Favorite Apocalypse (2001), both published by Graywolf Press. She received her MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama, and has been awarded a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Female Artists and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches at the College of New Jersey in Ewing. Kevin Varrone has had chapbooks published by ixnay press and Ugly Duckling Presse. He received his MA in creative writing from Temple University, where he teaches literature and writing.

“These artists have made significant contributions to Philadelphia’s creative community and beyond,” said Pew Fellowships in the Arts director Melissa Franklin. “The fellowship will provide them with invaluable resources to further their artistic goals and achievements, and to share their work with the public.”

Established in 1991 by the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Pew Fellowships are awarded annually to writers and artists at any stage of their career. The program has awarded 268 fellowships to 274 individual and collaborative artists, for a total of nearly $14 million in grants. Past fellows have included CA Conrad, Major Jackson, and Teresa Leo.

Writers and artists are nominated and invited to apply for the prestigious award. Recipients are then selected by a panel of established professionals in the fields of literary, visual, and performing arts.

For more information on the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, visit www.pcah.us.