Announcing our 2017 Undiscovered Voices Fellow: Julia Tagliere!

by: B. Rae Perryman

The Writer's Center is pleased to announce our
Undiscovered Voices Fellowship
winner for 2017:

Julia Tagliere

Each year, The Writer's Center awards a Washington, DC area writer earning less than $25,000 per year with this exclusive fellowship. We believe that writers of all backgrounds and experiences should have an opportunity to devote the time and energy toward their craft. Of the many qualified applicants, this year's winner was Julia Tagliere, who submitted a short story that wow-ed our judges.

Ms. Tagliere is a freelance writer and editor whose work has appeared in The Writer, The Bookends Review, Potomac Review, and Hay & Forage Grower (yes, that’s a thing), as well as in several anthologies, including Here in the Middle: Stories of Love, Loss, and Connection from the Ones Sandwiched in between; Candlesticks and Daggers—An Anthology of Mixed Genre Mysteries; the juried photography and prose collection Love + Lust; and The Way to My Heart: An Anthology of Food-Related Romance. Her short story, “Te Absolvo,” was named Best Short Story in the 2015 William Faulkner Literary Competition. Julia currently resides in Maryland with her family, where she recently completed her M.A. in Fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University. To learn more, visit her at justscribbling.com.  

Our Development & Community Outreach manager, Bethany Perryman, caught up with Ms. Tagliere. 

Read her exclusive interview below:

Bethany: First of all, congratulations on winning our Undiscovered Voices prize for 2017! We are so excited for you to be a part of our prestigious cadre of writers and literature lovers. Your short story was selected by judges as the best of many qualified candidates. How does it feel?

Julia: I'm incredibly honored and excited to see what the year ahead will bring. 

BP: You've also won other prizes for your short stories. Can you tell us what you think makes a great short story? 

JT: As a writer, there's no way to answer that without sounding like far more of an expert than I consider myself to be at this point in my writing--I mean, if there is a formula, I'd certainly love to learn it. As a reader, however, I find that the stories I most appreciate, first and foremost, move me in a way that lingers long after I've finished reading. It could be a really well-developed character, an unexpected twist in the narrative, lush imagery or rich, vivid language; in the best stories, all of those elements are present.  

BP: I'm personally curious: What's your process when you begin a new story? Do they come to you in a flash or inspiration, or...?

JT: Flash implies a much speedier process than what I normally experience. Sometimes the inspiration comes from an image or a feeling, a face I see, maybe something I see on the news. That thing, whatever it is, gets stuck in my mind like a grain of sand in an oyster, and I find myself coming back to it over and over again, worrying at it. It either drives me crazy, or it starts to grow and take shape into what I think might be a workable piece--usually both, if I'm being totally honest. 

BP: What are your plans for your next year at The Writer's Center? Any books or stories in the works?

JT: I have a novel in progress I've been twiddling away at for a while now, and I'm planning to use this next year with TWC to finally complete it. 

BP: What's the biggest setback you've encountered in your writing career? How do you deal with it?

JT: My biggest setback was probably being rejected repeatedly by a particular M.A. program some years back. It really stung for a while, to keep applying and keep being rejected. But I understand now that I wasn't prepared at that time--I had a lot of growing I needed to do as a writer to be ready for a program of that nature. I dealt with it by spending the next several years after my third and final rejection doing a lot of reading, independent studying, and connecting with other writers to try to reach a point where I felt comfortable applying again. 

BP: What's your favorite type of writing to do, and why? Tell us a little more about what turns your gears.

JT: I used to think I preferred writing novels, but since I've been working more in shorter forms lately (short stories, flash), I must confess, I enjoy the greater frequency of those moments of gratification that come from actually completing a story. Those moments take so long to arrive when writing a novel; it's easy to become discouraged. 

BP: Any last words of advice for students at the Center and other aspiring or emerging authors? What about for writers who are hoping to enter contests and fellowships? What's your secret, besides great work?!

JT: Writing can be a very lonely business, if you let it be. Step away from your keyboard for a while and engage with other writers. Take classes, attend conferences, engage with folks online via social media, form a writing group of your own, support local writers in their endeavors. Those connections not only can sustain you when you get down in the dumps about a given work-in-progress--and you will--but they can also help you learn about opportunities that will contribute to your growth as a writer. That's what it's all about, isn't it? 

For more information about the Undiscovered Voices Fellowship, please contact Bethany at b@writer.org.

TWC Names Emerging Writer Fellows

The Writer's Center is pleased to announce the recipients of its 2011-12 Emerging Writer Fellowships. The Emerging Writer Fellowships are awarded to writers who have published up to two book-length works of prose and up to three book-length works of poetry. We received 80 submissions for this round of awards. Writers applied from across the country and included a diverse pool of voices from a variety of backgrounds and traditions. 23 writers in three genres were selected as finalists, and from those, six writers were recommended by our committee to receive funding. This coming year, as in 2010-11, the Emerging Writer Fellowships will receive funding by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Our selection committee included members from our community: Margot Backas represented our Board of Directors; Deborah Ager, Bernadette Geyer, Laura Fargas, and Peter Brown represented our workshop leaders; and our membership was represented by Serena Agusto-Cox, Bettina Lanyi, and Mary Westcott.

The recipients will receive a cash prize and will appear in our fall & spring event series at The Writer’s Center. The lineups for the two events appear below.

Emerging Writer Fellowship Fall Celebration & Reading
Friday, September 23
Time: 7:30 p.m.

Ellis Avery
Ellis Avery is the author of two novels and a memoir. Her first novel, The Teahouse Fire, set in the tea ceremony world of 19th century Japan, won Lambda, Ohioana, and American Library Association Stonewall book awards and has been translated into five languages. Her second novel, The Last Nude, inspired by the Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, is forthcoming from Riverhead in January. Avery teaches creative writing at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Chris Goodrich
Christopher Goodrich teaches English and Play Directing at the Academy of Musical Theatre, Northwood High School, in Silver Spring, MD. He has also taught at New York University and Frostburg State University. His poems have appeared in Margie, Entelechy International, Diner, 5AM, Kestrel, Hotel Amerika, Rattle, The New York Quarterly, The Sycamore Review, The Cimarron Review, Cider Press Review, and The Worcester Review. He has been featured on Verse Daily and NPR. He is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize and holds an M.F.A. from New England College. A Chapbook, By Reaching, was published in 2007. His first book, Nevertheless Hello, was published in 2009. He has recently completed a second manuscript, "No Texting at the Dinner Table."

Angela Woodward
Angela Woodward is the author of the fiction collection The Human Mind and the novella End of the Fire Cult. Her stories have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Ninth Letter, Diagram, Salt Hill, 13th Moon, Pebble Lake Review, Gulf Coast, and Quarter After Eight. She has been a resident fellow at Ragdale (Lake Forest, Illinois), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, Nebraska), and the Northeast Frontier Foundation (Norton Island, Maine). She is a past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council fellowship for fiction. Several of her short stories have been adapted for the stage and performed at Chicago’s Rhinoceros Theater Festival and elsewhere. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.


Emerging Writer Fellowship Spring Celebration & Reading
Friday, March 23
Time: 7:30 p.m.

Ira Sukrungruang
Ira Sukrungruang is a Thai American, born and raised in the southside of Chicago. He co-edited with Donna Jarrell two literary anthologies about fat: What Are You Looking At? The First Fat Fiction Anthology and Scoot Over, Skinny: The Fat Nonfiction Anthology. His work has appeared in The Sun, Creative Nonfiction, North American Review, and other literary journals. Recently, his memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy was published by University of Missouri Press. He is the co-founder of Sweet: A Literary Confection, an online periodical, and teaches in the MFA program at University of South Florida.

Traci Brimhall
Traci Brimhall is the author of the forthcoming Our Lady of the Ruins , selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Rookery, winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Slate, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, and Southern Review. She is a former Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral candidate and a King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

Joanne Diaz
Joanne Diaz is the recipient of fellowships from the the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, the New York Times Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her book, The Lessons, won the Gerald Cable first book award and was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, and Third Coast. She is an assistant professor in the English department at Illinois Wesleyan University.

Emerging Writer Fellowships Announced

The Writer’s Center is pleased to announce the winners of the Fall 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowships. 

Fiction:

Doreen Baingana, Tropical Fish

Aryn Kyle, You Belong to Me

Poetry:

Alison Pelegrin, Big Muddy River of Stars

Jenny Browne, The Second Reason

Allison Benis White, Self Portrait with Crayon

Nonfiction:

Debra Gwartney, Live Through This

Our judges included representatives from The Writer’s Center’s Board of Directors, our corps of workshop leaders, and members of our community.  The judges were Takisha Adams, Margot Backas, Peter Brown, Shanti Chandrasekhar, Reb Livingston, Rion A. Scott, Cara Seitchek, and David Y. Todd.  We thank them for their service to this process!

The finalists were:

FICTION

Matt Bell, How They Were Found

Matt Bondurant, The Wettest County in the World

Lee Houck, Yield

John Jodzio, If You Lived Here You’d Already Be Home

Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World

Matthew Pitt, Attention Please Now

Laura van den Berg, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

Steven Wingate, Wifeshopping

Andrew Wingfield, Hear Him Roar

POETRY

Sally Ball, Annus Mirabilis

Neil de la Flor, Almost Dorothy

James Allen Hall, Now You’re the Enemy

Nick Lantz, The Lightning that Strikes the Neighbor’s House

Yahia Lababidi, Signposts to Elsewhere

Shelley Puhak, Stalin in Aruba

Lois Roma-Deeley, High Notes

Jason Schneiderman, Striking Surface

Mathias Svalina, Destruction Myth

NONFICTION

Jessica Handler, Invisible Sisters

Tania Katan, My One Night Stand with Cancer

Shawna Kenney, Imposters

Tom McAllister, Bury Me in Jersey

Kathryn Miles, Adventures with Ari

Adam Ruben, Surviving Your Stupid, Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School

Jane Satterfield, Daughters of Empire: A Year in Britain and Beyond

The fellowship competition will be opened again for Spring 2011, with applications due in September 2010.  To learn more, click here.

Mark Twain and Two Calls for Submissions

You may have seen the discussion of Mark Twain's autobiography at The Writer's Center's Facebook page yesterday, or not. Either way, here's some information on what amounts to an incredible thing: 100 years following his death, Twain's autobiography will see the light of day. Why stipulate the 100-year wait? We'll soon find out! Learn more about this book here.

Though we've not yet announced the winners of the Fall 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowships (we're down to the finalists which the EWF will select from next week), we're ready to announce our Spring 2011 call for Emerging Writer submissions. You can learn more about that here.

And don't forget, we're still accepting submissions (until July 1) for our Undiscovered Voices Fellowship. Learn more about those fellowships--where you can take up to 8 free workshops a year--right here.

Emerging Writer Fellowships: Last Call for Submissions

The deadline for these fellowships is April 30. So if you've got an interest in applying, get us your applications by Friday!

The Writer's Center, metropolitan Washington, DC's community gathering place for writers and readers, is currently accepting submissions for several competitive Emerging Writer Fellowships for Fall 2010. We welcome submissions from writers of all genres, backgrounds, and experiences in the following genres: fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Emerging Writer Fellows will be featured at The Writer's Center as part of Story/Stereo, our Emerging Writers Reading Series and live music fusion events.  The readings, held on Friday evenings, bring together writers and some of the area's best local musicians.  The Writer's Center book store will sell titles by the Emerging Writers throughout the season in which they appear in an effort to promote them and their work to a wide audience. 

Selected Fellows may be invited to lead a special Saturday workshop at The Writer's Center, with compensation commensurate with standard Writer's Center provisions.

Fellows receive an all-inclusive honorarium to help offset their travel costs, depending on their place of departure.  Writers within a 250 mile radius of the Center will receive $250; all others will receive $500.

Fellows for Spring 2009 include poets William Archila (The Art of Exile), Nicole Cooley (The Afflicted Girls), and Kathleen Flenniken (Famous); fiction writers Anthony Varallo (Out Loud), Marianne Villanueva (Mayor of the Roses), and Josh Weil (The New Valley); and nonfiction writers Steve Fellner (All Screwed Up) and Dawn Potter (Tracing Paradise: Two Years in Harmony with John Milton).

Emerging Writer Fellows will:

·        have 1 or 2 full-length single-author books published in a single genre, and no more than 3 books published to their credit (including as editors of anthologies) in any genre.  Chapbooks and pamphlets will not be calculated into an author’s total publication record and cannot be substituted for a full-length single-author book. Self-published titles or vanity press titles are not admissible and will not be considered.

·        be judged in the category in which their submitted creative selection falls.  In cases of cross-genre work or multiple-genre work, our staff will determine the genre of consideration.

·        have published books "in hand" or be in the uncorrected proof stage of publication at the time of their submission.

 

To be considered, please send:

·        a one-page letter of interest that includes the name of your creative selection and a short bio

·        a resume or CV that details publication history and familiarity facilitating group discussions or workshops

·        a creative selection from your most recent published book-length work in a Word document or RTF format:

o       Poetry: up to 10 pages of poems (1 poem per page)

o       Fiction & Nonfiction: up to 16 pages of text double-spaced with 1-inch margins

o       Your creative selection does not need to be one excerpt, but can be comprised of multiple sections or excerpts up to but not exceeding the total page limit.

A committee comprised of The Writer's Center board members, staff, and members will evaluate submissions on behalf of our community of writers. The deadline to submit is April 30, 2010. E-mail submissions are preferred.

Applicants are welcome to contact Charles Jensen, Director, with questions or for more information at 301-654-8664 or by email at charles.jensen@writer.org

The Writer's Center, established in 1976, is one of the nation's oldest and largest literary centers, dedicated to cultivating the creation, publication, presentation, and dissemination of literary work.  We provide over 60 free public events and more than 200 writing workshops each year, sell one of the largest selections of literary magazines in our on-site bookstore, and publish Poet Lore, America’s oldest continually published poetry journal.  Visit us at http://www.writer.org/.