Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Spring/Summer 2010 Emerging Writer Fellows Announced!

The Writer's Center is pleased to announce the recipients of Spring/Summer 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowships. During the application process, The Writer's Center received 85 submissions from emerging writers throughout the country. The recipients are:

FICTION


Marianne Villanueva, Mayor of the Roses Marianne Villanueva, a former Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford, has been writing and publishing stories about the Philippines and Filipino Americans since the mid 1980s. Her critically acclaimed first collection of short fiction, Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila (Calyx Books 1991) was short–listed for the Philippines’ National Book Award. Her work has been widely anthologized. Her story, “Silence,” first published in the Three Penny Review, was short–listed for the 2000 O. Henry Literature Prize, and “The Hand” was awarded first prize in Juked’s 2007 fiction contest. She has edited an anthology of Filipina women’s writings, Going Home to a Landscape, which was selected as a Notable Book by the prestigious Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. She currently teaches writing and literature at Foothill College and Notre Dame de Namur University. Born and raised in Manila, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Anthony Varallo, Out Loud
Anthony Varallo earned his MFA from the University of Iowa/Iowa Writers' Workshop and his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia. He joined the College of Charleston in 2005, where he teaches courses in creative writing and composition and serves as fiction editor for Crazyhorse. He has published two collections of short stories, Out Loud, winner of the 2008 Drue Heinz Literature Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press), and This Day in History, winner of the 2005 John Simmons Short Fiction Award (University of Iowa Press).




Josh Weil, The New Valley
Josh Weil is the author of the novella collection The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009), a New York Times Editors Choice. His fiction has been published in Granta, New England Review, American Short Fiction, and Narrative; he has written non-fiction for The New York Times, Granta, and Poets & Writers. Since earning his MFA from Columbia University, he has received a Fulbright grant, fellowships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and the Dana Award in Portfolio. As the 2009 Tickner Fellow, he is the writer-in-residence at Gilman School in Baltimore, where he is at work on a novel.




POETRY


Nicole Cooley, The Afflicted Girls
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. She received her BA from Brown University, her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and her PhD from Emory University. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, appeared with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. She also published a novel, Judy Garland, Ginger Love, with Regan Books/Harper Collins (1998). Her third book of poetry, Breach, a collection of poems about Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf Coast, is forthcoming from LSU Press.

William Archila, The Art of Exile
William Archila was born in Santa Ana, El Salvador in 1968. At the age of twelve, he fled a civil war that tore his country apart and immigrated to the United States in 1980. He eventually became an English teacher and earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. His poems have appeared in Agni, Blue Mesa Review, Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, The Los Angeles Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry International and Poetry Daily among others. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife. His first book is The Art of Exile.



Kathleen Flenniken, Famous
Kathleen Flenniken’s first book, Famous (University of Nebraska Press, 2006), won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was named a 2007 Notable Book by the American Library Association. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Daily, Poetry, and The Iowa Review. Flenniken is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship and an Artist Trust grant for her second manuscript, Atomic City. She teaches with Writers in the Schools in Seattle and other arts agencies, and is an editor with Floating Bridge Press, a non-profit poetry press.






NONFICTION



Steve Fellner, All Screwed Up
Steve Fellner is the author of a poetry collection (Marsh Hawk Press) and a memoir, All Screwed Up (Benu Press). He currently teaches at SUNY Brockport.






Dawn Potter, Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton
Dawn Potter is associate director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching, held each summer at Robert Frost's home in Franconia, New Hampshire. She has won writing fellowships from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Maine Arts Commission. In addition to Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton, her memoir about copying out all of Paradise Lost word for word while living in the Maine woods, she has just released her second poetry collection, How the Crimes Happened. New poems and essays appear in the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals. She serves on the Beloit Poetry Journal's editorial board and works frequently with both K-12 students and adult writers. Dawn lives in Harmony, Maine, with photographer Thomas Birtwistle and their two sons.


Writers applied for the competitive fellowships from across the country and included a diverse pool of voices from a variety of backgrounds and traditions. 30 writers from various genres were selected as finalists, and from those thirty, eight were recommended by a special committee to receive funding.

That committee included writer Ken Ackerman and former book publisher and NEH administrator Margot Backas, who represented our Board of Directors; Shannon O'Neill, a literary agent; poets Anne Harding Woodsworth and Judith Harris, who represented our corps of workshop leaders; and aspiring writers Melissa Wyse and Jamie White, who represented our membership.

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