FIU Video Profile of John Dufresne

FIU profiles Professor and Guggenheim recipient John Dufresne, who discusses teaching, writing, and the relationship between the two. "Every story should be a plunge into reality, not an escape from it."

Julie Marie Wade Receives Deming Fund Grant

Julie Marie Wade has received a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for her new creative nonfiction collection in progress, Other People's Mothers.   Wade is among nine awardees recently announced.  Her project is a collection of 12 autobiographical stories.

The Money For Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund is the oldest ongoing feminist granting agency. The fund gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists). Information about upcoming deadlines and application forms are available on the fund's website.

Joe Clifford's Short Story Collection: Choice Cuts

Joe Clifford's first book is out.  His story collection, Choice Cuts, has been published by Snubnose Press.  Of Choice Cuts, the Ampersand Review says, "What brings the collection together is the raw, no-holds-barred writing style, intense characterizations, and beyond twisted plotlines."

Snubnose Press will also be publishing Clifford's hardboiled novel, Wake the Undertaker, and Vagabondage Press will be bringing out his novel Junkie Love, both books scheduled for later in 2013.

After completing his MFA, Clifford moved to the San Francisco area, where he is the producer of Lip Service West, a "gritty, real, raw" reading series. He is also editor of the Flash Fiction Offensive. His work has appeared in Big Bridge, the Bryant Review, Drunken Boat, Fringe, Opium, and Word Riot, and many other journals. More info. on Joe's work can be found at www.joeclifford.com and his blog Candy & Cigarettes.

Julie Marie Wade's "Tremolo" Wins BLOOM Chapbook Award

Julie Marie Wade's "Tremolo" has been chosen by judge Bernard Cooper as the winner of the 2012 BLOOM Chapbook Prize for Nonfiction.  The chapbook will be published in Spring 2013.

In the award announcement, Cooper says, "It seems almost impossible that a writer could combine the candor of a memoir with the insight and engagement of a literary essay, but 'Tremolo' seamlessly weaves together the writer's search for sexual self-knowledge with insights into the poetry of Galway Kinnell and the fiction of Jane Austen. The prose here is both exact and inventive, the sensibility as restlessly probing as it is concise. These eighteen pages convey the sense of an entire lifetime, and the impact is as power as any reader could hope for.

Richard Blanco Chosen 2013 Inaugural Poet

FIU MFA program alumnus Richard Blanco has been chosen to be the 2013 inaugural poet. He will be reading a new poem composed for the occasion when President Obama takes the oath of office on the steps of the Capitol on January 21st. The New York Times reports: "Addie Whisenant, the inaugural committee’s spokeswoman, said Mr. Obama picked Mr. Blanco because the poet’s 'deeply personal poems are rooted in the idea of what it means to be an American.'”

Blanco's MFA thesis collection developed into his first book, City of a Hundred Fires, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize in 1997.  His most recent book,  Looking for the Gulf Motel, was published last year.  In an NPR interview airing Jan. 9th, Blanco discusses how being "made in Cuba, assembled in Spain, and imported to the United States" (as he has wryly described himself) has informed his work: "This whole idea of place and identity and what's home and what's not home, and which is in some ways such an American question that we've been asking since, you know, since [Walt] Whitman, trying to put that finger on America."