2018-19 Fellowship Recipients
Each year, the Program in Creative Writing and Translation awards more than $110,000 in fellowships to current and incoming MFA students. We're pleased to announce our fellowship recipients for the 2018-19 academic year. Congratulations to these writers for the talent and hard work that earned them these honors!
*NOTE: the Fulbright College Development Office must confirm each winner's eligibility before awards can be disbursed. Acceptance of these fellowships may impact your ability to secure funding from other sources, including student loans.*
Walton Family Fellowship in Poetry ($14,000)
Peter Mason
This selection of poems is heart-rending in its subject because of the fearless and steadfast honesty of the speaker, the determination to not look away from the traumatic childhood events that have shaped and scored the present moment in profound ways.
When the speaker confesses, “the men I tried to love were always / so delicate in the way they held me / between their hips as if a soft / rabbit’s back cradled in the damp / of their thighs,” I am arrested by the image, its provocation, its originality. In the second stanza, however, this poem turns violently in another direction, as the speaker’s therapist offers an abrupt contradiction: “my therapist says I don’t remember it / right.” Instead the speaker is told that “she” “churns / in your mouth here are all of your teeth / wet and shining in your palm.” This disembodied image—clearly the result of some violence that takes place off the page—is ominous in its foretelling.
I am impressed by the formal invention that these poems demonstrate again and again. The writer plays brilliantly with line breaks to disrupt meaning-making, to represent how PTSD unsettles and dislocates and fragments. The writer is also unflinching in what they confess, unwilling to make of the speaker only a victim, demanding that there be a degree of agency.
In “Naming the Thing,” the poet ushers the reader through a progression of childhood sexual trauma, demonstrating the difficulty in ordering past events, in “naming” what has occurred, because, of course, these events are not a singular thing. They do not carry a singular emotional effect. A relationship between an older sister and her younger brother, as dysfunctional and harmful as the one narrated in these poems, is still a familial thing, and the writer demands that we see if for what it was, for what it is in this present moment of poetry, its myriad reflections.
I am particularly drawn to the manner the poet uses natural imagery across all of these poems, especially that of water, of lakes, sending us all beneath the surface, drowning, struggling for shore, swimming for survival. “Am I speaking too much / flood,” the poet asks. “—god, I wish for / a different water.”
If there is any respite in these poems, it is proffered in “Crush 1999,” a love poem of considerable tenderness that closes the portfolio, calling forth a blossoming lilac like lace on a dress, a bare collarbone seen as “a trickled pond of redbirds / that will ribbon unsoftly with time,” and a crush on a boy that insists “I need to be pretty in the dark.”
These poems will live with me for a long time. Their power is earned and real. I’m thankful for the writer’s courage to write such difficult and necessary poems.
- Todd Davis, judge
Carolyn F. Walton Cole Fellowship in Poetry ($14,000)
Jacob Lindberg
The story these poems tell is visceral and physical and intimately tied to the animal world, and here the writer means the human animal, too, the violence the human animal carries, perhaps no different than that of a bear or bobcat.
The sonic-play in these poems is subtle, with slant rhyme and assonance creating echoes as we move through the narrative arc of a child’s relationship to his father and brother. And these sound devices are connected to the reoccurring images of predators and the potential violence such predators carry with them. As we are told in the initial poem, “The predator // Is smiling,” and that smile is full of foreboding.
The writer establishes a series of archetypes related to certain ideas of masculinity, including one set forth by the father—a man who might have been an artist but instead becomes a “man taught / He’s good at dangerous things.” And that archetype shapes the pattern for the son, for this eldest brother and the trouble he will encounter or mete out upon his younger brother. This troubling pattern, however, is balanced by the speaker’s desire for something different: “When I say I am trying to become / a better animal, I mean I have killed goodness in you.”
Regret runs through these poems, and like a wounded animal, the poems bound forward,
hoping to escape the violence that trails them: “Its blight grew out of me, and I
fashioned /
my pain inside you, left a dog limping in your stomach,” the poet writes. “I said
nothing right but barked as a dog would bark, / so you listened. When I howled, you
howled back // as best you could.” Two brothers speaking the language that has been
handed down to them by their father, by a culture that teaches boys to hit, to strike
out before another strikes.
These poems “track certain animals in uncertain light” in a language that is complex and beautiful. They present a narrative, although painful, that provides insight into the ways men have been taught to act.
- Todd Davis, judge
Walton Family Fellowship in Fiction ($14,000)
Mackenzie Peery McGee
This story starts out funny—all business-guy speak and rules and regulations. It’s about lost love for a moment, before it turns deep and strange. A machine takes a woman’s “waste”—her unhealthy parts—and then that waste stands up and turns human, or nearly. It’s a love story between the creature (part doppelganger, part story, part animal, part danger) and the man who rescues her. It stays funny but it’s never only that and the underbubbles get ever bigger and darker and sadder and more beautiful.
- Ramona Ausubel, judge
Carolyn F. Walton Cole Fellowship in Fiction ($14,000)
Joy Clark
With careful and exact language, this piece goes deep. It’s about the female body as an independent vessel and in relation to other bodies (mother, children, boys, observers) and about what the female body holds (life, danger, pleasure, temptation). The knot the writer makes of sex and love and family and God broke my heart—how hard this narrator is trying to be herself and how much she’s asked to give up because of it.
- Ramona Ausubel, judge
Walton Family Fellowship in Translation ($14,000)
Rome Hernández Morgan
Rita Indiana is celebrated for wit and rhythm; she’s a songwriter/musician, as well as a fiction writer, and her fiction often has the stop-and-start, turn-on-a-dime quality, the sudden surges and sudden silences of a great pop song. The biggest challenge of translating her work, however, is to capture the disaffected youthful idiosyncrasy of the narrative voices she constructs, to make them both unique and recognizable, and completely now. The translator has made a number of excellent choices — to translate into English some but not all of the names the narrator invents for the cat, for example— and as this translation hits its stride into the third and fourth pages, some brilliant ones: The “bolitas orgánicas” that the narrator tells a nonexistent interlocutor during a fake phone call that she’s been feeding a dog, become “organic pellets” in English — a strange name for dog food, but the right name for what you’d feed a rabbit. And of course, the narrator has a dead rabbit on her desk during the telephone charade. The translation thus deftly conveys the strain she is under. The culturally specific deadpan humor in this text is a big challenge to convey, but by the time I got to the hairball in the mayonnaise jar on p. 9, the translation was making me laugh. There’s still work to be done; for example, I would keep the name of Tío Fin’s friend as Bienvenido — a word recognizable to almost all English readers — rather than translating it to Welcome. But this is an exceptionally promising piece of work.
- Esther Allen, judge
Lily Peter Fellowship in Poetry ($1,700)
Sam Binns
The five poems (“Self-Portrait in the Hour of Mercury,” “The Arkansas River,” “Roadkill,” “Gospel According to My Uncle’s Missing Knuckle,” and “Thinking of Home”) have all the hallmarks of lyric poetry: image-driven, driven by sonics, and invite the reader to move associatively through a distinctly-rendered and compelling landscape. This poet lives in the world and bears out the poet’s responsibility to observe it closely. In the first poem, the poet’s decision to anaphorize the speaker through the lowercase “i” doesn’t feel stage-y or trite: on the contrary, the reader moves across the line into the succession of carefully-orchestrated images and movement after movement into figurative language that surprises at each turn. The second poem’s perfect tercets and couplets permit the reader to – yes – inhabit the landscape the poet describes/enacts, but also invite the reader to bring through the poem just enough of the narrative from stanza to stanza. The third poem’s percussive diction demonstrates a true marriage of form and content. The fourth poem simply has the most compelling title this reader has seen in a long time. The fifth poem is so like a Jean Valentine poem, and yet is so very much the property of the place that the poet inhabits – physically, imaginatively.
- Joan Kane, judge
Lily Peter Fellowship in Poetry ($1,700)
Mackenzie Peery McGee
The five poems (“Zeno’s Hawk,” “Scull Creek, Sacred,” “Seraphim,” “What Remains of a Wasp’s Nest,” and “Dusk at Kure Beach”) display such a control over time, the line, and the poem’s place on the page. The first poem’s conceit and interrogation of Zeno’s paradox ruptures open with the first line of its second stanza and then through the graceful terrace of the third stanza, prepares the reader for the way in which the poem never ends. The second poem employs actual rhetoric, which is, let’s just be frank, seldom seen in this day and age when cognition has been banished from contemporary poetry in favor of glamour (I do wish “crape” was spelled “crepe” but I think this error might be intentional?). The third poem’s final line of the first stanza and the entire last stanza are quite near perfect. The fourth and fifth recall Plath at her most harrowing. I could say more, praising the slant and perfect rhymes in the last two poems, the meditative and loaded quality of each line, but hey, Plath at her most harrowing.
- Joan Kane, judge
Lily Peter Fellowship in Fiction ($1,700)
Kaitlyn Yates
"Laguna" is a held story--held in a quiet and deliberate but daring space. It's rhythms and diction won't rush us and yet something is ebbing, always ebbing in this piece. There is a drift of an island, but also one of loss and time. Such a story can sometime run itself out through metaphor or, conversely, can fall short of its images and themes. "Laguna" manages a great balancing act of story-world and our world's story (of departures and endings). It does this so gracefully, it's hard to remember lands don't drift off from us through great swells of grief and acceptance all the time. It's hard to remember and not worth doing so either when there is such a story.
- Natanya Pulley, judge
Lily Peter Fellowship in Fiction ($1,700)
Claire Pincumbe
"Cassini" promises death and prepares us for such an inevitability. We accept this end coming. The narration-- concise, clever, beguiling--guides us well. We forget it's gallows humor. In doing so, we are faced with our reflection: what we do for discovery and knowledge. What we do to try to tame a universe. What we do to creation for the sake of a future. Such a story can be told through essay, poem, article, and documentary, but what makes this imaginative prose piece so compelling is its willingness to plunge not only a spacecraft through an atmosphere and into a celestial body, but a reader as well. What we find, we cannot escape no matter the lightyears between us and our ending.
- Natanya Pulley, judge
Lily Peter Fellowship in Translation ($1,700)
Rome Hernández Morgan
My selection for the Lily Peter Fellowship is Names and Animals, the translation of the first chapter of Nombres y Animales. The translation is a delight—fluid, with just the humorous, light touch of the original. But even before I read the original, as a translator I could see the deft handling in English of the wordplay, something that is always difficult, and was impressed by how well the translation maintains a colloquial, informal tone. These are the things that make a translation work—and when done right, as they are here, are invisible to the happy reader of the English language edition of the book. I was impressed—more than that—I was inspired by this wonderful, masterful translation.
- Jesse Lee Kercheval, judge
James T. Whitehead Award for Poetry ($2,370)
Jacob Lindberg
The author of these poems has produced a truly compelling, tightly composed, richly imagined body of work. The author presents his/her actual and implied narratives in a sort of exoskeletal form, within which connections between inner and outer consciousness are explored, rendered. While this may sound abstract, the poems themselves are filled with things and events. There are all sorts of elements of nature – flora and fauna – as well as intimate, interior spaces. The judicious hints of the surreal (‘the words the bent metal made,’) contribute to but do not dominate what seems finally to be a series of painful and violent memories opening into revelations. One thing that further distinguishes this group of poems is the absolute presence of the poet in the work, speaking with a fully developed voice.
- Ralph Adamo, judge
James T. Whitehead Award for Poetry ($2,370)
Madeline Vardell
I chose this group, finally, because it was unavoidably memorable. When I considered the entire competition, poems in this group always came to the surface first. I think there are two reasons, or three, for this: the poems are about the body, about its experiences, needs, functions; therefore, the poems have a palpable physicality that produces a sense of intimate knowledge; and, importantly, the poems give us their intense and even voyeuristic revelations within a cleverly recessed execution of form. Like the other selected entry, this group presents a poet with a strongly developed voice, and the confidence to take it to the edge.
- Ralph Adamo, judge
James T. Whitehead Award for Fiction ($2,370)
Jenee Skinner
“Kwento” manages multiple feats at once. It delivers exquisite tension via a mother’s desperation for her disappeared children, and the mystery of her circumstances. It also roots us inside the concentric circles of familial, social, and political drama. The many characters and subplots within “Kwento”’s 20 pages, along with the seesawing back and forth in time, have novelistic depth and sweep, while the particularities manage to be both beautiful and painful. Details, like Kwento’s pregnancy craving for tree bark, which had a “crookedness and grit that soothed her insides,” demonstrate the writer’s commitment to precision. I won’t soon forget this mama and her coconut.
- Courtney Zoffness, judge
James T. Whitehead Award for Fiction ($2,370)
Kaitlyn Yates
“Laguna” is a story built from impressionistic strokes, and meaningful details. It acquires depth and beauty as one moves forward, and showcases a writer who thinks carefully about language and rhythm and pacing. There’s admirable restraint here, both in the parsing of information and backstory and on the level of the sentence. This combination of style and content rivets us to a fictional television, on whose screen we see drama that not only evokes Brexit and global warming, but reflects the characters’ states of mind—and our own.
- Courtney Zoffness, judge
Baucum-Fulkerson Prize in Fiction/Drama ($400)
Mackenzie Peery McGee
“Re: Frankie” is a remarkable story not only for its inventive structure—it’s told exclusively through emails a dystopian “biowaste technician” sends to his ex-girlfriend—but also for the way it satirizes our culture’s tendency to dismiss women’s emotions. The details of this alternate world, such as the Rejuve Units and the bureaucracy of biowaste management, are wildly imaginative and rely on a sustained internal logic. And for a story about a society virtually incapable of taking women’s pain and emotion seriously, it’s deeply satisfying and ironic that the male protagonist proves to be the most sentimental and irrational character. “Re: Frankie” was entertaining, edgy, and a great example of a writer using the tools of speculative fiction to access what is truly real.
- John Englehart, judge
John & Shirley Holmes Award for Creative Nonfiction ($400)
Rome Hernández Morgan
I've picked "Landscape Theory." It commended itself for nuance and persistence of thought. In today's light the tenacity of its analytic thread nudges it to the top.
Felix McKean Memorial Award for Poetry ($1,000)
Katherine Davis
The three poems in this submission present nuanced and complex portraits of three women, fascinating outcasts depicted with such realism and vivid imagery that we can’t help but feel as if we know them. The speaker in these poems stands outside, constantly considering the role of the observer and the part the speaker plays in what happens to these women; through this distance, we paradoxically come to build an intuitive understanding of the speaker. The poet’s facility with rhythm and internal sound elements creates a subtle music that seems to rise naturally from the lines. Common, ordinary magic is evoked throughout this submission with startlingly exact and beautiful images, continually surprising us. The poet’s artistic vision—and the execution with which this vision is pursued—indicate an exciting and original larger project; I look forward to reading more of these well-crafted poems.
Miller Williams Prize ($500)
Samantha Kirby
For her translations, from French, of "L'été d'Olta" ("Olta's Summer") by the Albanian writer Ornela Vorpsi.
Harrison/Whitehead Founders’ Fellowships ($2,076)
Gwen Mauroner
Patrick Font
Creative Writing Instructors
CWI: 7 sections
Sam Binns
Josh Luckenbach
Gwen Mauroner
Emma Jones
Victoria Hudson
Landon McGee
Kaitlyn Yates
CW II: 2 sections
Jenee Skinner
Madeline Vardell