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."

Spot the FIU MFA Program at the Miami Book Fair This Weekend

FIU’s MFA program will be well-represented at Miami Book Fair International this weekend, Nov. 17 & 18th.  To find when any of those listed below are presenting, check the Author List. You can see the full Book Fair schedule here.


Faculty who'll be representing their latest books: Lynne Barrett (Magpies), Debra Dean (The Mirrored World),  Campbell McGrath (In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys), and Les Standiford (Desperate Sons: Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, and the Secret Bands of Radicals Who Led the Colonies to War). In addition, our long-time writer-in-residence Dan Wakefield returns to Miami with Kurt Vonnegut: Letters. And James W. Hall (retired, but teaching this Spring) discusses Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers.

Alumni authors you can hear at the Fair: Richard Blanco Looking for the Gulf Motel, J.J. Colagrande (Decò), M.J. Fievre So Spoke the Earth: A Haiti Anthology, Yousi Mazpule (Jinetera: Story of a Cuban Prostitute), Jesse Millner (Dispatches from the Department of Supernatural Explanation), Melanie Neale (Boat Girl:  A Memoir of Youth, Love, & Fiberglass), and Neil Plakcy (Dog Helps Those). 

Perhaps the best opportunity of seeing lots of MFA people together will be the Sweat Broadside Collaboration reading and panel in Centre Gallery, Sat. at 2:30. Lynne Barrett, John Dufresne, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Yaddyra Peralta and Nick Vagnoni will be among those reading from their contributions to this artist-writer collaborative project. Others who participated are David Beaty, Pete Borrebach, David Gonzalez who may be in the audience and joining in the discussion, and the show of 50+ broadsheets is up in the gallery now through early December.

Behind the scenes at the Book Fair, making this huge event happen, MFA alumna Lissette Mendez is Program Coordinator at the Center @ MDC (the organization that runs the Fair as well as workshops all year and the Miami Writers Institute), and alumnus Nick  Garnett is Copywriter and Editor.  Current MFA student Jennifer McCauley is an intern with the Fair this fall. All week, MFA students and alumni will be participating in The Florida Book Review annual live-blog of the Book Fair, led by FBR Editor Lynne Barrett.  Those far from Miami can keep up with the Fair by reading the coverage which has already begun.

So Spoke the Earth, Edited by M.J. Fievre, Debuts

M.F.A. alumna M.J. Fievre has edited So Spoke the Earth, a Haiti anthology, published by Women Writers of Haitian Descent, Inc.  The collection of essays, stories, and poems includes work in English, French, and Creole, and is organized into three sections ("Death Was Lurking," "And the Danger Came Rushing In," and "And the Truth Shall Make you Mad") in which contributors explore Haiti's "past, present and future as experienced by its diverse inhabitants—both native and non-native—over the past four decades." 


Fievre will be moderating a panel featuring contributor Edwige Danticat at Miami Book Fair International. Among the contributors is current MFA student Fabienne Sylvia Josaphat. Women Writers of Haitian Descent, Inc., is a literary organization founded in 2002 to encourage the development of Haitian women writers and to promote greater public awareness and appreciation of their work. Their website is www.wwohd.org.  For more on M.J. Fievre, see her website.

Dan Wakefield Has Edited Kurt Vonnegut: The Letters

FIU's long-time Writer-in-Residence Dan Wakefield has "splendidly assembled and edited" (New York Times) the letters of Kurt Vonnegut. The book is just out from Delacorte Press. A starred review in Publishers Weekly says of Kurt Vonnegut: The Letters,  “Fans will find the collection as spellbinding as Vonnegut’s best novels, and casual readers will discover letters as splendid in their own way as those of Keats.”
 

Dan's many fans in South Florida will be welcoming him back to Miami in November when he'll appear at Miami Book Fair International.  Dan was Writer-in-Residence in the FIU Creative Writing Program from 1994-2010, and received the university's Excellence in Graduate Mentorship Award. He teaches in the Low Residency MFA in Writing Program at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.  and leads workshops  in "Spiritual Autobiography" and "Creating from the Spirit" all around the U.S.  Readers can learn more about Dan's novels, books of nonfiction, and many other projects and achievements on his website.