Roger Reeves, left, and Malachi Black, Lilly Fellows

For the second year running, a student in the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) in Writing program of the Michener Center for Writers has received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, among the most distinguished awards for aspiring poets who have yet to publish a book.  The fellowships are given by the Poetry Foundation, one of the largest literary foundations in the world and publisher of Poetry magazine.

Roger Reeves was one of the five Lilly fellows chosen in 2008 from a field of some 860 applicants nationwide.  His classmate Malachi Black was one of five selected in 2009.  Fellows receive a $15,000 stipend for the award year and publication in Poetry magazine, the country’s oldest and most venerated poetry journal, established by Harriet Monroe in 1912.

Reeves and Black serve as poetry editors for the university’s literary magazine, Bat City Review and are both in their final year of the MFA program at The University of Texas at Austin.

Reeves, who grew up in Mount Holly, New Jersey, attended Princeton University and completed his Bachelor of Arts in English, magna cum laude, at Morehouse College in 2003. He received an master’s in English with a certificate in Women’s Studies from Texas A&M University. A former Cave Canem fellow, Reeves has published work in American Literary Review, Sou’Wester, and Indiana Review and was included in the 2009 Best New Poets anthology.

Black, who also grew up in New Jersey, earned his Bachelor of Arts in literature from New York University in 2004 and is literary editor for the New York Quarterly. His poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Iowa Review, the Southwest Review, and Pleiades and were chosen for the 2008 Best New Poets.

Established in 1989 by the Indianapolis philanthropist Ruth Lilly, the fellowship program is open to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age.  In 2005, Michener Center poet Michael McGriff was the first UT graduate student to be honored with a Lilly Fellowship.

Reeves says the Lilly support this past year afforded him the opportunity to experiment with longer writing projects and to travel for research. “It’s also helped settle my nerves, in terms of feeling like I was a fraud,” he laughs.

“It’s an incredibly humbling recognition,” says Black of the fellowship.

Highlighting Oshinsky’s historical account of the polio epidemic in America, Gates addressed the need for improvements in global health care and medical technologies. Watch the video segment.

Learn more about Oshinsky’s book in the feature “More Than a March of Dimes.”

Variously described as narrative, experimental, Southern, deeply personal, and fiercely political, Wright credits her roots in the Arkansas Ozarks for her resistance to joining a single, identifying “ism” of the poetry world—she was born to a stubborn independence.  And the breadth of her range is as great as the remove between her home state and her adopted one, Rhode Island, where she has taught for more than 25 years at Brown University.

Wright is on The University of Texas at Austin campus for two weeks as the current Michener Residency Award Author, conducting a workshop with poetry MFA candidates of the Michener Center for Writers.  Her visit will conclude with a public reading of her own work on Thursday, September 24.

Recognized with fellowship support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bunting Institute, and the Guggenheim Foundation, a MacArthur “genius” grant, a Whiting Award, and a Lannan Literary Award, Wright’s work includes the book-length poem “Deepstep Come Shining;” a collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster on inmates in the Louisiana Prison system,” One Big Self;” and her own quirky ars poetica “Cooling Time:  An American Poetry Vigil.”

This year, her newest book, “Rising, Falling, Hovering,” won the 2009 Griffin Poetry International Prize. The judges citation calls it a “red-hot political epic . . . poetry as white phosphorus, written with merciless love and depthless anger.  ’Rising, Falling, Hovering’ is about conflict, local and global, and how failures of the heart bring disaster on every scale.”

She will read at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 24 at the Avaya Auditorium, ACE 2.302, on the southeast corner of 24th Street and Speedway on campus.

]]> http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/2009/09/22/poet-c-d-wright-visits-ut-campus/feed/ 0 http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/2009/09/08/burn-fire-lake-pond-prize/ http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/2009/09/08/burn-fire-lake-pond-prize/#comments Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:07:58 +0000 Marla Akin http://www.utexas.edu/opa/blogs/shelflife/?p=3202 Two former classmates from The University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers’ MFA class of 2004 have won major recognition for their debut poetry collections.  Jessica Garratt was awarded the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her “Fire Pond,” (University of Utah Press).  And Carrie Fountain received the 2009 National Poetry Series award for her “Burn Lake,” (Penguin Books) which will be released  in early 2010.  The uncanny similarity of their titles is entirely coincidental, each poet having followed a very different trajectory since graduating…]]> Two former classmates from The University of Texas at Austin’s Michener Center for Writers’ MFA class of 2004 have won major recognition for their debut poetry collections.  Jessica Garratt was awarded the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry for her “Fire Pond,” (University of Utah Press).  And Carrie Fountain received the 2009 National Poetry Series award for her “Burn Lake,” (Penguin Books) which will be released  in early 2010.  The uncanny similarity of their titles is entirely coincidental, each poet having followed a very different trajectory since graduating five years ago.

Jessica Garratt, author of "Fire Pond"

Garratt, a native of rural Maryland who also earned her Bachelor of Arts in English from The University of Texas at Austin in 2001, is now completing her doctorate in creative writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is editor of its acclaimed literary journal, Missouri Review.  Her book was selected by judge Medbh McGuckian, who said:  “Garratt’s philosophical curiosity and openness are counterpoints to her refreshing wit and humor.  She narrates her private heartbreaks candidly but without self pity or narcissism, while infusing her work with an Emersonian sense of place as sacred.” This relatively new prize honors University of Utah’s beloved teacher of poetry, Agha Shahid Ali, who died in 2001.

Fountain—who hails from Las Cruces and did her undergraduate work in theatre arts at New Mexico State—stayed on in Austin first as co-managing director of  Grrl Action, a writing and performance program for teenage girls, and now teaches full-time in the English Writing and Rhetoric Department at St. Edward’s University.

Poet Natasha Tretheway selected Fountain’s book manuscript for the National Poetry Series, a literary awards program began in 1978 to heighten the visibility of good poetry in American publishing.  Curiously, MCW benefactor James A. Michener was one of its earliest supporters. When the proposal to start such a program was put before the Library of Congress, Michener read of it and was immediately moved to contribute.  He released a statement to the press explaining his decision:

I thought it deplorable that…the poet was at such a disadvantage, and it occurred to me that in my education the study of poetry was of at least as much significance as the study of prose . . . . It was an essential part of my inheritance and I would feel impoverished without it . . . .  But I also suspected that while I was writing my long books of prose, there might be some gifted young woman at the University of Michigan who was saying it all in some eight-line verse, and saying it much better. There was a real chance that her verse might live a hell of lot longer than my eight hundred pages, and I deemed it deplorable that I could get published while she could not.

The Michener Center for Writers plans a joint reading in Austin as soon as Fountain’s book is available.

What is a quinceañera?  In the Hispanic culture, it’s a girl’s 15th birthday party, a coming-of-age celebration much like a sweet sixteen, but with much deeper religious and social significance.  Belinda, who was born in Nebraska to a mother from South Texas and a father from Northern Mexico, had never attended one before she signed the book contract.  She threw herself into researching the ritual, attending quinceañeras, going to trade shows, talking to other Latinas about their experiences, and reading such books as Julia Alvarez’s “Once Upon a Quinceañera: Coming of Age in the USA.”

The result is a book that smartly and deftly explores questions of family relationships as well as cultural identity.  Acosta, who regularly reviews TV and other media in her weekly column, found inspiration in such shows as the hit OC, which combines story lines of teenaged characters with those of adult characters and appeals to viewers of widely differing ages.

Set in San Antonio, Texas, the novel tells the story of Ana Ruiz, a working professional and mother of 14-year-old  Carmen. Carmen blames her mother for their father’s recent abandonment of the family, and Ana plans the party as a means to reconnect with her angry daughter, but things go terribly awry. Author Joy Castro lauds Acosta’s deft portrayal of the “psychological tensions that the quinceañera moment provokes in mothers who are forced . . . to face their own aging at exactly the moment they’re supposed to be celebrating their daughters’ beauty and maturity.”  Belinda seamlessly weaves Spanish and Spanglish into her prose, giving the novel a lively and authentic voice.

In addition to her column and freelance reviews, Acosta is also a playwright and essayist whose work has appeared in Poets and Writers and aired on Latino USA.

A book release party is planned on August 18th at Cuba Libra (409 Colorado) from 6 to 8 p.m.—complete with cocktails, cupcakes and dancing, a sort of belated quinceañera for Acosta herself.  On August 25, she will read and book sign at 7 p.m. at BookPeople, on the corner of West 6th and N. Lamar.

Even before its official release on August 10th, Oscar Casares’ novel, “Amigoland,” is following in the footsteps of his acclaimed 2003 debut, “Brownsville.” Both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly gave the novel starred reviews, and USA Today and Time Out New York included it on their recommended summer reading lists even before it was in print. Harper’s and The Wall Street Journal, among others, have upcoming reviews and Texas Monthly has excerpted the novel in its August issue.  A state-wide tour is scheduled in bookstores, on campuses, and at literary festivals throughout the fall.

Austin’s BookPeople will host a reading by Casares and a book signing at 7 p.m., Thursday, August 13.

Casares joined fiction faculty of the Department of English and the Michener Center for Writers in 2004 after “Brownsville’s” publication to critical acclaim.  Reviewers agreed that his collected stories had captured the unique Tex Mex culture of his hometown and the ordinary joys and sorrows of his characters without reducing them to socioeconomic stereotypes or writing “message” fiction. The New York Times said “with quiet mastery of the smallest detail, Casares puts us on neighborly terms with the locals.”

“Amigoland,” set on the South Texas border with Mexico, is the story of estranged brothers Don Fidencio Rosales—querulous, nearly 92 years old, and living in a nursing home—and Don Celestino, twenty years his junior and newly widowed, who finds himself somewhat ambivalently involved with his young cleaning woman, Socorro. The housekeeper is a catalyst for the brothers reconnecting, and the improbable trio takes off on a bus trip into Mexico, where the siblings hope to settle a long-standing dispute about how their grandfather arrived in the U.S. and Socorro hopes to find clarity in her unlikely romance. The trip stirs up powerful issues of family and pride and about how we care for the people we love.

BookPeople is on the corner of West 6th Street and North Lamar Blvd.

Astronaut on the moon with American flag. From NASA photo no. AS11-40-5875

From the Vietnam War to capital punishment, Norman Mailer engaged the important intellectual and social issues of his time. So it should come as no surprise that Mailer chronicled America’s space program and the 1969 journey of Apollo 11 in a three-part article for LIFE Magazine. Portions of the piece ultimately became Mailer’s book “Of a Fire on the Moon” (Little, Brown, 1970).

As Mailer stated in a letter to Neil Armstrong on February 26, 1970, “I’ve worked as assiduously as any writer I know to portray the space program in its largest not its smallest dimension.” In “Of a Fire on the Moon,” Mailer searches for the moral and philosophical meaning of landing on the moon.

View Mailer’s handwritten manuscripts, research materials, NASA photographs, and notes concerning “Of a Fire on the Moon,” all from Mailer’s archive at the Ransom Center. The collection, which includes materials associated with all of Mailer’s literary projects, whether completed or not, contains more than 1,000 boxes of materials and is available to researchers, students, and the public.

The Harry Ransom Center has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to host The Big Read in Austin, focusing on Edgar Allan Poe’s stories and poems.

Beginning Sept. 8, the Ransom Center opens the exhibition “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe,” commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Poe, the great American poet, critic and inventor of the detective story.

The Ransom Center’s sponsored Big Read events include a performance hosted by Isaiah Sheffer of “Selected Shorts,” heard on public radio stations across America, a Poe film series featuring “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1928), “The Raven” (1963), “The Pit and Pendulum” (1961), and a performance of “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Lucas A. (Scot) Powe Jr., a professor of law and government at The University of Texas at Austin, will be at BookPeople this Monday, May 4, at 7:30 p.m. to discuss and sign his lastest book, “The Supreme Court and the American Elite, 1789-2008″ (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Powe, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas in 1970-71, is a leading historian of the Supreme Court and a First Amendment scholar.

In his new book released this month, Powe provides a revealing look at the history of the Court and the close ties between its decisions and the nation’s politics at the time. He does this by rendering fresh judgments on key decisions, showing how virtually every major Supreme Court ruling suited the wishes of the most powerful politicians of the time. The story begins with the creation of the Constitution and ends with the June 2008 decisions on the rights of detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Powe has written three other books including “The Warren Court and American Politics” (Harvard) and was a principal commentator on the 2007 four-part PBS series “The Supreme Court.”

In a career spanning five decades, William S. Merwin has published more than fifty books of poetry, translations and prose. Beginning with the Yale Younger Poets award in 1952 for his first collection “A Mask for Janus,” his work has received the highest accolades the literary world can bestow:  The Pulitzer Prize (in 1970 for “The Carrier of Ladders”), the Tanning Prize, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, among others.  His recent collected poems “Migration” has received the 2005 National Book Award.

Seating at the auditorium is limited to 200 and parking is available at the San Jacinto garage, two blocks east of the auditorium.