Last year's winners of the Emerging Writer Fellowships, Tanya Olson (left) and Karina Borowicz (right), will be reading at the Center on Sunday, October 4 at 2 p.m. and Sunday, October 11 at 2 p.m. Olson and Borowicz will appear with Nancy Naomi Carlson and Ann MacLaughlin respectively. Awarded each year to two emerging writers, the Fellowships offer the opportunity to read at
the Center and receive a cash honorarium.
Tanya Olson lives
in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is a lecturer in English at University of
Maryland Baltimore County. Her first book, Boyishly, was published
by YesYes Books in 2013 and received a 2014 American Book Award. In 2010, she
won a Discovery/Boston Review prize and was named a 2011 Lambda
Fellow by the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Olson emphasizes the importance of building a system of
support. “I was a long-standing member of a writing group in Durham, the Black
Socks, and I learned so much as a beginning writer from the other poets in the
group,” she said. “I also have a partner who comes to readings, doesn't bat an
eye when I get up in the middle of the night to write things down, and is
generally very patient with my moody poet tendencies.”
The second winner this year, Karina Borowicz, is the author
of two poetry collections, Proof
(Codhill Press, 2014) and The Bees Are
Waiting (Marick Press, 2012), which won the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry
and was named a Must-Read by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her poems
have appeared widely in journals and have been featured on the web and in
radio. Trained as an historian, Borowicz also holds an M.F.A. in creative writing
from the University of New Hampshire. She makes her home in the Connecticut
River Valley of Western Massachusetts.
Borowicz works at Springfield College’s writing and resource
center for returning students. She also
occasionally leads poetry workshops as a writer-in-the-schools, but most of her
career, she earned a living teaching English as a Second Language, which also
allowed her to travel. “Before that, I worked as a baker, cook, and caterer,”
she says. “I’m pretty serious about food.”
“Throughout all these various jobs and careers, I always
made time for writing, trying to fit it in during spare moments, often in the
evening or even during a lunch break,” she went on to say. “These days, however, writing time is my top
priority and I make sure to put in at least an hour first thing in the morning,
five days a week, before the world starts making its demands.”
As someone who has had to eke out writing time for many
years, Borowicz has good advice for other emerging writers. “Read widely and
deeply in your chosen genre, which will not only provide valuable lessons in
craft, but also sharpen your instincts about what works and what doesn’t,” she
said. But don’t hole up as a bookworm all the time. “Be sure to engage with the
world in a concrete way, because we experience the world through our senses and
the best writers know that. Tolstoy took
up shoemaking. Bake bread, learn bookbinding, keep bees, grow vegetables. Get
your hands dirty—your writing will be the richer for it.”
Requirements for the Emerging Writers Fellowship include the publication of
one or two full-length single-author books in a single genre and no more than
three books published to their credit (including as editors of anthologies) in
any genre. Keep your eyes peeled for our official announcement of this year's winners coming soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment