Active Graduate Awards

Spring 2009 Graduate Literary Prize Awards: Fiction

Status: Awarded

Judge: Rebecca Lee

Rebecca Lee has published fiction in the Atlantic Monthly, Zoetrope, and has won the 2001 National Magazine Award for Fiction. Her novel, The City is A Rising Tide, was published in 2006 by Simon and Schuster. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington

Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Award, $500: Blair Croan, "Pig Balls"

This is a very funny, elegant piece, right from the first visceral paragraph. This writer is so talented, and has somehow so gracefully combined pathos and humor. There is a subtle, awkward possible-romance in the story, and a genuine awakening at the end. As well there is a very comical "action  scene at the heart of the story, and considerable literary attention paid to a bucket of pig balls in the story. Also, this story knows what work is. It describes so interestingly how mountain oysters are prepared, as well as how quilts are made. To my mind, though it's quite short, it is a fully realized story, a real gem.

Robert J. and Katharin Carr Graduate Fiction Prize, $300: Lindsey Drager, "The Way to Get Inside the Mind Is Through the Hair"

This is an intense, cerebral piece. The writer is clearly in love with the language, and has such a great facility for writing about ideas in fiction. The surface of this story reads like a poem, at times, though maybe one written by Derrida, but the core of the story is a relationship, an unrequited one essentially, and the reader reads for the suspense of that conclusion as well. This writer is a genuine stylist, and the work is private, fully felt, and deeply intelligent.

Honorable Mention: Brian Kornell, "Condoms and Deodorant"

Spring 2009 Graduate Literary Prize Awards: Poetry

Status: Awarded

Judge: Sally Ball

Sally Ball is the author of Annus Mirabilis (NY: Barrow Street, 2005) and the associate director of Four Way Books. She teaches at Arizona State University in Tempe. She has new poems in recent or forthcoming issues of the American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Pleiades, Slate, The Yale Review, and elsewhere.

Carol Kyle Award for Poetry, $400: Lillian Bertram

I admire the combination of mind and ear in these poems: their rhythms and consonance and swift articulate thought: "I, coyote, fell in love/ with grackle, a common icterid/ in decline. For this I would/ be broken. I would take// breaking/ over meanness." GP 07 moves deftly from narrow focus to a wide angle: we lean in to the intimacy of a detail--yes, okay, a little closer--and then a sudden shift or intensification either entices or cold cocks us toward an unexpected finish. "Inside the Face Inside the Heart Inside" opens with an open-heart surgery (or art project) in which the incisors of a meadow vole serve as scalpel. The heart, 07 reminds us, coyly, is less important as a symbol for feeling than as the fuel-pump for the chemistry that keeps us ticking. [She] turns a wary eye toward [her] beloved,


[like whose] rueful face, crumpled & embryonic,

the heart, too,

        is an injury: involuntary tissue

that opens and closes

whipped by the pummel of its own wind.

These poems are bold in the face of unanswerable pains and cares.

Robert J. and Katharin Carr Graduate Poetry Prize, $300: Dana Burchfield

At first these poems provoked my resistance. I was both drawn to and thwarted by the colons, which deepen but also limit the syntactical possibilities, funneling the poems' inquisitive energy forward without having to reckon with any untoward interruptions or conclusions. I also see here, though, in the experiments with punctuation (in general, Colons Everywhere or Nothing Anywhere), a faith in the ability of music to take the mind further. So many of these poems have refrains--forgive me, tell me, because--their urgency is palpable, their music both stimulant and narcotic. The colons provide a way to breathe without having to pause, and the poems without punctuation by contrast gain an airy appearance, less dense on the page; they trail off rather than close in. In either case, the syntax dodges particular doubts while conveying a restiveness so complete that doubt seems pervasive, the fundamental given. Reading these poems, I share their agitation, appreciate their enchantments, their rippled extensions,  and, like the speaker of "Pastoral," "I cannot look away."





Past Graduate Awards

Spring 2008 Graduate Literary Prize Awards: Fiction

Status: Awarded

Aside from five collections of poems, Nance Van Winckel, this year íxs judge, has also published three collections of short stories—most recently Curtain Creek Farm with Persea Books (2001). She has new fiction in AGNI, Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and The New Ohio Review (/NOR). For a new collection of linked short stories in progress, Nance recently received a Christopher Isherwood Fiction Fellowship. She teaches in the graduate creative writing programs of Vermont College and Eastern Washington University.

Eleven writers submitted stories. Below are the winners and the judge íxs comments.

Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Award in Short Fiction, $500: Micah Riecker, íxThe Amazing Steven. íÿ íxThe Amazing Steven íÿ has what I most look for in fiction: liveliness at all levels, most especially with the prose itself. The author has such dexterity with diction and syntax—playing, as we say in the biz, all the notes on the piano. He can and does range widely from the muscular complex sentences to the short pithy and often quite poetic ones, e.g. íxIn town there was a street and a street light dawn all night. Never dark. íÿ í"Also, I particularly admired the dialogue. This writer has a wonderful ear for the real way people talk. There are compelling, vivid, and interesting details of action and characters on every page, making every page a delight to read.

Robert J. and Katharin Carr Graduate Fiction Prize, $300: Crystal S. Thomas, íxAnywhere But Here. íÿ íxAnywhere But Here íÿ is a vividly rendered story. I especially admired our narrator, Mirabel: a complex and quirkily intriguing woman. But what really enlivens and elevates this story is how well several storylines are interwoven; complications from the past live on and haunt the present. This story has a poignant ending that is unexpected and entirely right.

Honorable Mention: Cory Holding, íxAscendancy. íÿ

Spring 2008 Graduate Literary Prize Awards: Poetry

Status: Awarded

Angie Estes, this year íxs judge, is the author of three books, most recently Chez Nous (Oberlin College Press, 2005). Her second book, Voice-Over (Oberlin College Press, 2002), won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, The Uses of Passion (1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize. Recent poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Ninth Letter, and Slate, Gondola Signore Gondola: Venice in 20th Century American Poetry (Supernova Edizioni, Venezia, 2007), and Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality (Bottom Dog Press, 2006).

Twelve writers submitted poems. Below are the winners and the judge íxs comments.

Carol Kyle Award for Poetry, $400: Dana Burchfield, íxOur gardens have drowned. íÿ I love this poem for its taut and energetic lines, for the resonance and music of its language: íxfor the wind/ where we mine in the nave/ of some avian church. íÿ And I admire the way that the poem íxs structure and pacing won íxt let the reader not read the poem. Indeed, the poem moves in the manner of Hansel and Gretel, enticing with its trail of bits of language, which it simultaneously—like the birds from the same tale—ingests until at last the reader finds herself in some strange clearing, not sure how it is that she has arrived. In this way, the poem movingly accomplishes what Wallace Stevens says all poems should do: íxstimulate the sense of living and of being alive. íÿ

Robert J. and Katharin Carr Poetry Prize, $300: Matt Minicucci, "That I carried the Aeneid in my pocket for a Semester." This poem íxs title begins what the poem develops so well: an engaging tension created by the juxtaposition of classical subject matter, informal diction, and pop—literally, íxpop-up íÿ book—culture. It íxs an ambitious poem that uses the íxclamor and clattering íÿ of wordplay rather than swords to suggest how the past can be íxparaphrased íÿ or íxtranslated íÿ into the íxcurrent íÿ of now. And in an amazing sleight-of-hand, the poet manages to conflate ancient battle and postmodern poetics so that words themselves, rather than shields, become íxbronze blankets to the dead. íÿ

Honorable Mention: Jaime Brunton, íxSulphur Spring Road. íÿ

Spring 2007 Graduate Literary Prize Awards: Fiction

Deadline: March 7, 2008, 11.a.m.

Peter Rock, the 2007 judge, is the author of the novels The Bewildered, The Ambidextrist, This is the Place, and Carnival Wolves,, and a story collection, The Unsettling. Rock attended Deep Springs College, received a BA in English from Yale University, and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and other awards, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon, where he is an Associate Professor in the English Department of Reed College. Excerpts from his comments on the winning stories appear below.

Josephine M. Bresee Memorial Award in Short Fiction, $500: Ted Sanders, íxMomentary. íÿ

"This startling tale features a voice í"that draws its readers in with sharp description and insights too far in to turn back when we realize that there is danger in this sharpness"

Robert J. and Katharin Carr Graduate Fiction Prize, $300: Cory Holding, íxHoles."

"The controlled calmness of the prose and the insinuating use of the second person narration make this confident story an unsettling pleasure to read."

Honorable Mention: Amy Sayre-Roberts, íxFlood. íÿ

Spring 2008 Graduate Literary Prize Awards: Poetry

Deadline: March 7, 2008, 11.a.m.

Ross Gay, the 2007 judge, is the author of a book of poems, Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Margie, and many others. An editor with Q Avenue, a chapbook press, Ross is a faculty member at New England College's low-residency MFA program and will be joining Indiana University's poetry faculty in the fall. He is also a Cave Canem fellow. Excerpts from his comments on the winning entries appear below.

Carol Kyle Award for Poetry, $400: Jaime Brunton, "from An Appalachia Visitor's Guide to Common Usage."

"This poem has guts. It's formally sophisticated without sacrificing a subject, which is the only subject, which is something about real people, real things in the world"

Robert J. and Katharin Carr Poetry Prize, $300: Lillian Bertram, "Rio, 1966."

"I'm interested in this poem's subtle and wandering consideration of race--which is a difficult subject to consider subtly or wandering."

Honorable Mention, Leslie Singleton, "The Book of Judges."

About the Graduate Literary Prize Awards in Fiction and Poetry

The English Department office (208 English) is in charge of accepting and processing entries. Only graduate students are eligible to compete. The name, address, phone number, e-mail address, net id, grad or undergrad, and UIN number of the writer are to appear on a title sheet that will be separate from the entry. The writer's name is not to appear on the entry itself. Entries will not be returned.