Wednesday, February 20, 2013

Campbell McGrath & Dennis Lehane Win Gold Medals in the Florida Book Awards

Prof. Campbell McGrath and MFA program alumnus Dennis Lehane have each won gold medals in the Florida Book Awards for books published in 2012. The awards are coordinated by the Florida State Libraries and co-sponsored by a number of Florida literary and cultural institutions. The medals will be presented at the Florida Heritage Awards ceremonies in Tallahassee on March 20, 2013.

McGrath's In The Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys won the Gold Medal in Poetry. This is McGrath's third win in the Florida Book Awards.  Shannon won the 2009 Poetry Gold Medal, and Seven Notebooks the 2008 Silver in Poetry.  “It feels great, it’s an honor,” McGrath said. “I love the idea of the Florida Book Awards, they bring attention to Floridian literature, the arts and culture. This is an award unique to our home state, so it’s important.”

The Gold Medal for General Fiction went to Live By Night, Lehane's eleventh book, tenth novel and the second in his historical series that follows Joe Coughlin, the son of a Boston police captain turned mobster during the prohibition era of the 1920s.

Other FIU Creative Writing winners in past years are: Lynne Barrett, Gold Medal, General Fiction 2011, for Magpies; alumna Patricia Engel, Silver Medal, General Fiction 2010, for Vida; Denise Duhamel, Silver Medal, Poetry 2009, for Ka-Ching!; alumnus Jesse Millner, Bronze Medal, Poetry 2009, for Neighborhoods of My Past Sorrow;  John Dufresne, Gold Medal, General Fiction 2008, for Requiem, Mass; James W. Hall, Silver Medal, Genre Fiction 2007 for Magic City; and alumnus Leonard Nash, Silver Medal, General Fiction 2007, for You Can't Get There From Here. The Florida Book Awards were established in 2006 to recognize, honor, and celebrate the best Florida literature published each year.


Monday, February 18, 2013

John W. Evans Wins River Teeth Book Award

River Teeth has announced that FIU MFA alumnus John W. Evans is the winner of the 2013 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Award, for his manuscript Young Widower. The book will be published in 2014 by the University of Nebraska Press.

Evans is the author of two poetry chapbooks, No Season (FWQ) and Zugzwang (RockSaw). Since completing his MFA, he has been a Stegner Fellow in Poetry and a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he continues to teach creative writing. You can learn more about Evans and his writing at his website.

Denise Duhamel's Blowout Published

The University of Pittsburgh Press has just published Denise Duhamel's poetry collection Blowout. "Blowout is both a celebration and mourning of romantic love—the blowout of a party, as well as the sudden rupture of a front tire."  Booklist says Blowout, "presents the miracle of how serious a life embedded in humdrum and commercialized reality can be...'Worst Case Scenario'—a solid block of successive personal disasters—negatively apotheosizes just such embeddedness. It takes your breath away."
 

Sunday April 7th at 4 PM,  FIU's Denise Duhamel and Julie Marie Wade, along with U.M.'s Maureen Seaton, will be reading from their new books at Books and Books in Coral Gables, FL. Mark your calendars for this trio now.