Hopwood Newsletter Vol. LXXVIX, 1

lsa.umich.edu/hopwood

HOPWOOD

Editor Andrea Beauchamp Design Jeremy Mitchell

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January 2018

The Hopwood Newsletter is published electronically twice a year, in January and July. It lists the publications and activities of winners of the Summer Hopwood Contest, Hopwood Underclassmen Contest, Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Contest, and the Hopwood Award Theodore Roethke Prize.

Sad as I am to be leaving, I’m delighted to announce my replacement as the Hopwood Awards Program Assistant Director. Hannah is a Hopwood winner herself in Undergraduate Poetry in 2009. Her email address is ensorh@umich.edu, so you should address future newsletter items to her.

Hannah EnsorPhoto Credit: Aisha Sabatini Sloan

INSIDE: Books and ChapbooksArticles and EssaysReviews

FictionPoetryDramaFilm/Video/Audio

News and Notes Awards and HonorsDeathsSpecial Annoucements

Jesmyn Ward

Hannah Ensor is from Michigan and received her MFA in poetry at the University of Arizona. She joins the Hopwood Program from the University of Arizona Poetry Center, where she was the literary director, overseeing the Poetry Center’s reading & lecture series, classes & workshops program, student contests, and summer residency program. Hannah is a also co-editor of textsound.org (with poet and Michigan alumna Laura Wetherington), a contributing poetry editor for DIAGRAM, and has served as president of the board of directors of Casa Libre en la Solana, a literary arts nonprofit in Tucson, Arizona. Her first book of poetry, The Anxiety of Responsible Men, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in 2018, and A Body of Athletics, an anthology of contemporary sports literature co-edited with Natalie Diaz, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press.

We’re very happy to report that Jesmyn Ward was made a 2017 MacArthur Fellow for her fiction, in which she explores “the enduring bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans of the rural South against a landscape of circumscribed possibilities and lost potential.” She will receive $625,000 over five years to spend any way she chooses. The fellowships reward exceptional “originality, insight and potential.” The MacArthur Foundation goes on to say:

“Jesmyn Ward is a fiction writer exploring the bonds of community and familial love among poor African Americans in the rural South.

She is the author of three novels and a memoir, all set in the Gulf Coast region of her native Mississippi and centered on marginalized black communities. In prose that is simultaneously luminous and achingly honest, Ward captures moments of beauty, tenderness, and resilience against a bleak landscape of crushing poverty, racism, addiction, and incarceration.

The novel Salvage the Bones (2011) follows the four siblings of the Batiste family as they protect and nurture each other in the days leading up to and just after Hurricane Katrina.

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Ward transcends the brutal reality of their experiences—pit bull fights, a missed opportunity to attend college, a pregnancy at fifteen—through the narration of Esch, who imagines herself as a triumphant Medea, a strong, beautiful, and legendary leader. Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), Ward's most recent novel [winner of a 2017 National Book Award for fiction], is wider in its scope, moving back and forth in time and including the voices of ghosts and the people they haunt. Ward does not shy away from uncomfortable truths or how her characters' own flawed choices contribute to their situations. Leonie and Michael's drug addiction and selfish love for one another force their young son, JoJo, to assume the role of parent to his toddler sister. When the family journeys upstate to pick up Michael from Parchman Prison, JoJo encounters the ghost of Richie, a young boy who died at the prison in the 1940s, revealing the long legacy of Parchman both in JoJo's family and as a tool for oppressing black communities in Mississippi.

In her novels and nonfiction accounts of her own experiences with loss and injustice, Ward is offering a raw and powerful portrayal of the circumscribed possibilities and lost potential faced by many African Americans after generations of racial and economic inequality.”

We send warmest congratulations!

This was the last year for the Summer Hopwood Contest, due to the low number of submissions. Spring/Summer writing students may use their courses to enter other Hopwood contests in the academic year. The judges this year, former Hopwood Awards winners Emily McLaughlin and Francis Santana, were impressed with the work of the following winners:

Summer Hopwood Fiction: Evan Rose, 600; Riva Szostkowski, $600

Summer Hopwood Nonfiction: Kathryn Orwig; $600; Joshua S. Rabotnick, $1,000

The Marjorie Rapaport Award in Poetry contest has been moved to the Fall semester.

Antonya Nelson Photo Credit: Dolly Trouster

Antonya Nelson will read at the Hopwood Underclassmen Awards Ceremony on January 30 at 3:30 in the Rackham Amphitheatre. She is the author of four novels, including Living to Tell and Bound, and seven short story collections, including Some Fun, Nothing Right, and, most recently, Funny Once. Her short stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Quarterly West, Harper's, and other magazines. They have been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, as well as in the University of Houston's Creative Writing Program.

Janet Leahy will deliver the Hopwood Lecture following the announcement of the awards at the Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Awards Ceremony. It will be held on April 18, at 3:30 p.m. in the Rackham Amphitheatre. She was a graduate of UCLA’s school of film and television.

She started her career as a secretary on the situation comedy Newhart and went on to become a freelance writer for the series. From there she spent eighteen years as a comedy writer, producing, writing and executive producing for series such as Cheers, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, and Grace Under Fire, amongst others. Her work continued in the one hour arena as Consulting Producer on Gilmore Girls, followed by Executive Producer of Boston Legal, Life Unexpected, and Mad Men. She has received several Emmy nominations and awards, as well as the Writers’ Guild and Peabody awards for her work. Janet Leahy

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John U. Baconwith John Saunders, Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope, Da Capo Press, 2017. The book is about legendary sportscaster John Saunders’ lifelong struggle with depression; The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism, William Morrow, 2017.

Samiya BashirField Theories, poetry, Nightboat, 2017.

Donald Beagle“I am pleased to send word that the publication link went live today [August 3] on Amazon.com for Radcliffe Squires: Selected Poems: 1950-1985.” https://www.amazon.com/dp/1618460331/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1501684449&sr=8-1&keywords=radcliffe+squires+selected+poems. Don also provided a link to Tamsin Smith reading “A Day in Salamanca” at the 2015 Aspen Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Dxcn5cOYA&t=34s

Franny ChoiDeath by Sex Machine, a poetry chapbook, Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017.

Maury DeanWho’s Your Tiger? The Four Greatest Detroit Tiger Hitters of All Time, nonfiction, Maxwell Hunter Publishing, 2017.

Mary GaitskillSomebody with a Little Hammer: Essays, Pantheon, 2017.

Merrill GilfillanSmall Weathers, poems, Qua Books, 2004; Red Mavis, poems, Flood Editions, Chicago,

Garrett HongoThe Mirror Diary: Selected Essays, part of the “Poets on Poetry” series, University of Michigan Press, 2017.

Cynthia L. HavenEvolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, forthcoming with Michigan State University Press in spring 2018.

Lawrence JosephSo Where Are We? Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Laura KasischkeWhere Now: New and Selected Poems, selected for the National Book Award longlist, Copper Canyon Press, 2017.

Judith KirschtThe Camera’s Eye, a novel, New Libri Press, 2017, available in print or as ebook on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. The novel was a finalist for the William Faulkner Wisdom Award in 2015.

Danielle LazarinBack Talk, Penguin, 2017.

Publications by

Hopwood Winners*

Books and Chapbooks

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Karyna McGlynnHothouse, poetry, Sarabande, 2017.

Celeste NgLittle Fires Everywhere, a novel, Penguin Press, 2017.

Benjamin PaloffLost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe, Northwestern University Press, 2016; And His Orchestra, Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series, 2015.

Marge PiercyMade in Detroit, paperback edition, poetry, Knopf, 2017.

Sara SchaffSay Something Nice About Me, stories, Augury books, 2016. The book was a fiction finalist for the CLMP Firecracker Awards and a short fiction finalist in the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

Carrie SmithUnholy City: A Clare Codella Mystery, Crooked Lane, 2017.

Danez SmithDon’t Call Us Dead: Poems. Selected for the National Book Award longlist, Graywolf, 2017.

Laura Hulthen ThomasStates of Motion, Made in Michigan Wrtiers’ Series, stories, Wayne State University Press, 2017.

Rosmarie WaldropTranslated and Selected The Up and Down of Feet: Poems 1994-2010 by Elke Erb, Burning Deck Press, 2017; Translated with Laura Marris Triste Tristan and Other Poems by Paol Keineg, Burning Deck Press, 2017. These are the last two books published by Burning Deck Press, after 56 years, and we owe Keith and Rosmarie a real debt for producing the work of so many writers, along with their own poems.

Jesmyn WardSing, Unburied, Sing, a novel, Scribner, 2017.

Holly Wren SpauldingPilgrim, poems, Alice Greene & Co., 2014; If August, poems, Alice Greene & Co., 2017.

Howard R. WolfHome at the End of the Day: An American Family Drama in Three Acts, Prestige Books International, 2017.

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mso-michiganwolverines.tumblr.com

Articles and Essays

The following Hopwood winners contributed pieces to the “On Beauty” issue of the English Department's 2017 Alumni Newsletter: Michael Byers, Laura Kasischke, Aric Knuth, Lillian Li,

Beth Aviv“I Could Have Been a Better Friend” in the Autumn 2017 London Reader.

Sven Birkerts“Derek Walcott at BU: A Sorting, AGNI #86, 2017; “So . . . how do you say it?” The AGNI Newsletter, November, 2017.

Jeremiah Chamberlain“Interview with Kirstin Valdez Quale,” Glimmer Train #100, Fall 2017.

David Gewanter“Accidents of Bread in Cheese: Trump at Table,” Agni Online (Sept. 2017); “The Love Bite,” Agni Online (2015).

Michael Idov (Zilberman)“Russia: Life After Trust,” New York, January 23, 2017; “My Accidental Career as a Russian Screenwriter,” New York Times Magazine, January 10, 2016.

Cynthia L. Haven“Mad Russia Hurt Me into Poetry: An Interview with Maria Stepanova,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 15, 2017; “Writing Not Fighting,” Times Literary Supplement, April 19, 2017; ‘Robert Conquest's Muses,” Times Literary Supplement, November 2, 2016; “A Conversation with Lena Herzog,” Music & Literature, Times Literary Supplement, November 2, 2016; “Joseph Brodsky: Darker and Brighter, The Nation, April 18, 2016; “Rediscovering Regina Derieva,” Times Literary Supplement, October 8, 2014; “Milosz as California Poet,” Quarterly Conversation, March 4, 2013.

Jascha KesslerA letter in the Financial Times, October 6, 2017.

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Cammie McGovern“A Vision for a Child with Autism,” New York Times Science section, September 12, 2017.

Rachel Morganstern-Clarren“The Vagaries of Exile: Migrant Literature from Quebec,” Words Without Borders, October 2017. “My feature on contemporary Quebec authors who were born outside of Canada and who write in French, their second language, includes new work by Kim Thuy (translated by Sheila Fischman), Sergio Kokis (tr. by Hugh Hazelton), Ying Chen (tr. by Pamela Casey), and Pan Bouyoucas (tr. by Éric Fontaine and myself).”

Celeste NgInterviewed in the New York Times Book Review, September 24, 2017.

Kathryn Orwig“Salt,” Confined Connections, Z Publishing House, 2017.

Marge Piercy“Barbie Doll 45 Years Later”, Open Road/Early Bird Books Newsletter, March 2017; “Poetry Tip,” Poetry Tips, April 2017; “The Journey of Adrienne Rich,” Tikkun, Summer 2017.

Paige Pfleger“DNA testing reunites family after 50 years,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Anna Prushinskaya“Love Letter to Woody Plants,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Paisley Rekdahl“Nightingale: A Gloss,” The American Poetry Review, September/October 2017.

Sara Schaff“What I Think About When I Hear 'Take Me Home Country Roads,’” Hobart, July 2017; “The Age of Success,” Superstition Review, April 2017; “On Ben Harper's 'Another Lonely Day,’” Coldfront, January 2017; “Art For Our Sake,” The Story Prize Blog, December 2016; “When Your Characters Live Inside Your Childhood Home,” LitHub, November 2016.

Ian SingletonTwo publications in Fiction Writers Review this Spring: “Little Histories in Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time,” http://fictionwritersreview.com/essay/little-histories-in-svetlana Alexievichs-secondhand-time/ and an interview with Hopwood winner Laura Thomas:http://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-laura-thomas/

Ann Tashi Slater“The Stories Behind Ordinary Lives and Things,” an interview with Hiromi Kawakami, Huffington Post, July 16, 2017; “Driving to Shangri-La in Flocklit.com, with an audio feature at http://flocklit.com/slater-driving/; “Traveling in Bardo,” AGNI #86, 2017.

Mairead Small Staid“The Calamity Prayer,” The Georgia Review, Summer 2017; “Second Person,” The Southern Review, Summer 2017.

Jesmyn WardAn interview in The New York Times Book Review, September 3, 2017; “Delisle, Mississippi,” Harper’s, October 2017.

Maya West“Brit-Pop for a Nuclear Standoff,” The New York Times, August 26, 2017.

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Reviews

Laurence W. ThomasA review of Phillip Sterling’s new book of poems, And Then Snow, Third Wednesday, Fall 2017.

Fiction

Beth Aviv“My Friend and My Ex or the Power of Fiction,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2017.

Yoni Brenner“Surprise Outcomes to the Mueller Probe,” The New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2017; “Acceptable Forms of Protest for N.F.L. Programs,” November 6, 2017.

Michael Byers“A Good Breath,” The Missouri Review, Summer 2017; “Fair Seed-Time,” Ploughshares, Summer 2017; “The Sky in Ohio,” The Common, Issue 14, 2017.

Ellen Dreyer“An excerpt from ‘Heartland,’” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Dennis Foon“My Acid Trip,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Alyson Foster“The View from the Fourth Floor,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Clare Higgins“Love & Other Disorders,” Clare Higgins“Desdemona,” “nine ways of looking at her knees,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Kathryn Orwig“The Empath,” “Run,” “Coffee?” Confined Connections, Z Publishing House, 2017;

Matthew Pollock“The Cell Phone,” Xylem, a publication of the Undergraduate English Association at the University of Michigan, 2012-2013.

Kristen Roupenian“The Night Runner,” Colorado Review, Fall/Winter 2017.

Sara Schaff“Some of Us Can Leave,” featured in The Literary Review, February 2017, originally appeared in Carve Magazine; “That Won't Be Necessary,” Joyland, November 2016; “Marie and Parker Threw a Party,” LitHub, November 2016; “Shelter,” Southern Humanities Review, August 2016; “Better Than Fine,” Chicago Quarterly Review, April 2016.

Ian Singleton“First Time,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Ben Stroud“Souvenir,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer 2017.

Laura Hulthen Thomas“Third and Manageable, or Why I Bought My Son a Rifle,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Howard R. Wolf“The Icicles of Eggertsville,” (“a remake, to some extent of Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’”), forthcoming from The Commonwealth Review.

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http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/visuals/album/annarbor/

Peter Anderson“Acid,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Fatimah Asghar“From ‘Oil,’” Poetry, November 2017. She is a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow. “Kul,” The Common, Issue 14, 2017.

Stephen Eric Berry“The Eleventh Muse,” with a drawing by John Elkert, Soundings East, Spring 2017.

Claudia Buckholts“The Summer in Oklahoma,” The Southern Review, Summer 2017. She is the author of Bitterwater and Traveling Through the Body.

Giancarlo Buonomo“Oedipus at Concord,” Xylem, a publication of the Undergraduate English Association at the University of Michigan, 2012-2013.

Victoria Chang“Obit—Memory,” “Obit—Music,” “Obit—Grief,” New England Review, XXXVIII, 3, 2017.

Franny Choi“Choi,” “Comforts,” “We Will Hold the U.S. Wholly Accountable for the Catastrophic Consequences to Be Entailed by Its Outrageous Actions,” “Ode to Epineprine,” “Cloven,” The American Poetry Review, November/December 2017; “Perihelion,” Poetry, November 2017.

Poetry

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Ben Gunsberg“Floating Exhibit,” a finalist for the James Wright Poetry Award, Mid-American Review, XXXVII, 2, 2017.

Nick Harp“East Then West,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 2017.

Clare Higgins“Desdemona,” “nine ways of looking at her knees,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Garrett Hongo“Kubota to Zbigniew Herbert in Lvov, 1941,” Poetry, July/August 2017.

Lawrence Joseph“In This Language, in War’s Revolutions,” “Of What We Know Now,” Kenyon Review, July/August 2017.

Laura Kasischke“The Widows’ Neighborhood,” New York Times Magazine section, September 1, 2017; “At Gettysburg,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Dave Lucas“Marsyas on Aethetics,” The Threepenny Review #151, Fall 2017.

Courtney Mandryk“Condensation Early Morning,” Hayden’s Ferry Review, Spring/Summer 2015.

Derek Mong“’When the Earth Flies into the Sun” Kenyon Review, July/August 2017.

Kathryn Orwig “I Am That I Am,” Confined Connections, Z Publishing House, 2017.

Bob Clifford“Devils Gate Rawlins where your dreams died,” Farewell to the lonesome warrior,” “The casket makers for wars,” “As the daisies wake up for another day of sun,” “Running through the Assabet Valley,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

David Gewanter“The Ego Anthology: II & V,” forthcoming in Harvard Review; “Convictions: Slavery after Slavery,” Permafrost 2017 (39.2); “Scope” and “’a late evening in the future,’” Poet Lore, Fall/Winter 2017.

Marge Piercy“The low road,” The Sun, October 2017; “At least a hill,” “My shadow is long,” San Diego Poetry Annual 2016-17; “This is no longer my room,” “The cemetery of spent passions,” The Comstock Review, Fall/Winter 2016 30th Anniversary Issue; “I pass them,” “Cats for dummies,” “At the turning of the tide,” Marsh Hawk Review, Spring 2017; “Long polished,” Visions International #95; “Between, neither sleeping or awake,” “Chicago one summer,” December, volume 28.1 Spring/Summer 2017; “Even wine turns at last to vinegar,” Fifth Wednesday, Spring 2017, Issue 20; “Save me,” “Summer, bummer,” Chiron Review, Issue #107, Spring 2017; “A couple of meetings,” Cortland Review, April 2017; “Holiday of leaves,” “How we do it,” “How it is now,” “Living among them,” “My shifting shadow,” “Without warning, a door,” “Happy birthday to me,” “What happiness looks like,” Paterson Literary Review, Issue 45, 2017-2018; “The Patrilineal Side,” Ibbetson Street, #41, June 2017; “That wild rush,” “Remnants of a dead marriage,” “Praise in spite of all,” LIPS, #45/46, 2017; “The dinner lottery,” Parody, Vol. 6, Issue 1, April 2017; “Algonquins call this the crow moon,” 2018 Lunar Calendar, Issue 42; “I’d worship them but lack the temperament,” “Mid-March and winter stays put,” Connecticut River Review, 2017; “As the day dies, shadows grow,” Visions International, #96, Fall 2017; “What was in those looted streets,” Chiron Review, Issue #108. Summer 2017; “The President-Elect Speaks,” Nasty Women Poets, Edited by Grace Bauer & Julie Kane, Lost Horse Press, 2017.

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Paisley Rekdal“Driving to Santa Fe,” Poetry, July/August 2017; “The Gather,” “Pear,” “Pythagorean,” Willow Springs #80, Fall 2017; “Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi,” The Best American Poetry 2017, edited by Natasha Tretheway; “Leash,” “Horn of Plenty,” New England Review, XXXVIII, 3, 2017.

Matthew Rohrer“Poets With History/Poets Without History,” “Mary Wollstonecraft Traveling with Her Kids,” “What Is More Distracting Than Clouds,” “Like a Sausage,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Francis Santana“Letter Found in a Crate,” Rattle #56, Summer 2017.

Sara Schaff“Marble City,” The Adirondack Review, September 2017.

Elizabeth Schmuhl“#67,” “#37,” RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Danez Smith“crown,” Granta #140, Summer 2017; “juxtaposing the road kill & my body,” Indiana Review, Winter 2014; “last summer of innocence,” The Best American Poetry 2017, edited by Natasha Tretheway.

Laurence W. Thomas“The Story of Wars,” forthcoming in Blue Unicorn in California; “Ghazal on a Clouded Day” and “Learning to Walk,” Third Wednesday, Fall 2017; “Equanimity” and “Colors of Recall,” Grist (in Missouri), 2017.

Richard Widerkehr“Silence,” Third Wednesday, Fall 2017.

Martha Zweig“Ghazal”, Skidrow Penthouse, #19, 2016; “Beyond Me” and “Séance,” Poetry Northwest, vol. XI, issue 2, winter-spring 2017; “Dubious Provenance” and “Hinterland,” Slice, issue 21, fall, 2017-winter 2018; “Mothers’ Day,” in Spillway #25, summer 2017; “All Hell" and “The Husks”, Southern Poetry Review, 55:1, issue 72, 2017; “Adult Life” and “Big Bang” in Innisfree #25;“Finale” in The National Poetry Review #15, “Troth,” One #13.

A wolverine, a native species notorious for its relentless hunting and scavenging instincts. (Photo: Per Harald Olsen/NTNU/CC BY 2.0)

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Peter Anderson“Excerpt from ‘The Banana from Outer Space,’” a musical comedy, RC Alumni Journal, Fall 2017.

Matthew HittingerPhoto Credit: Nadine Robbins

Drama

Film/Video/Audio

Dr. Sherman Silber“Incas—The Brevity of Glory and the Origin of Vegetables,” “Polar Bears: Documenting Their Warming World,” productions of The Fertility Center of St. Louis, 2017.

News

& NotesFrank Beaver continues his very popular series in Michigan Today: “Talking About Movies.” The November column featured a discussion of Christmas movies, “Oh, you’re a holiday.”

Stephen Eric Berryhas accepted an invitation by Dickinson scholar Marta Werner to be a discussion leader at the upcoming annual meeting of the Emily Dickinson International Society. The four-person roundtable will be focused on Dickinson and Pedagogy, in particular, finding ways for teacher-scholar-artists in EDIS to build meaningful partnerships with teacher-scholar-artists working in public high schools. The annual meeting will be held in Amherst, MA on August 3-4.

Laura Kasischke, Sarah Messer, and Laura Thomas were program participants in the Residential College’s 50th anniversary celebration in October.

John U. Bacongave a talk in the book he wrote with John Saunders, Playing Hurt: My Journey from Despair to Hope (Da Capo Press, 2017) at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor on September 14. He.gave a talk on his newest nonfiction book, The Great Halifax Explosion, in Rackham Auditorium on November 7.

Cynthia Haven“I think you mentioned my 2011 book, An Invisible Rope: Portraits of Czesław Miłosz, with Ohio University Press. That year, the centennial of Miłosz's birth, I went around the world, speaking at the British Academy and the University College London, the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, the American University in Paris, and with Columbia University in New York City, and elsewhere.” She wrote her new book, Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, while a visiting scholar at Stanford and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. “I'm still blogging at the high-traffic Book Haven on the Stanford website (almost 8 years now, as I recall...). We've been linked in The New Yorker and discussed in The Guardian. Articles republished in Le Monde, La Repubblica, and Die Welt. We've even started an international controversy that was picked up on NPR and The New York Times and everywhere else. (A new publication of Huck Finn.)”

Tung-Hui HuUM English professor Tung-Hui Hu talked with technology journalist David Pogue about “the cloud” for CBS Sunday Morning's cover story. Tung-Hui, who teaches in UM's Digital Studies program, is the prizewinning author of four books, most recently A Prehistory of the Cloud (MIT Press, 2015). The program aired on October 22 and also streamed online as well.

Celeste Nggave a talk on her novel Little Fires Everywhere, (Penguin Press, 2017) at Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor on September 22.

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Laura Hulthen Thomas was featured in the “5 Over 50: Lives of Debut Authors” article in the November/December 2017 Poets and Writers magazine.

Sam Walkergave a talk on his latest nonfiction book, The Captain Class: The Hidden Forces That Create the World’s Greatest Teams (Random House, 2017) on September 21 in Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor.

Jim AllynHis short story “The Master of Negwegon” was selected for inclusion in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, edited by John Sandford and published in October by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and available on Amazon, etc. He writes: “If you google ‘Brothers published in same book,’ you'll see a news story about my brother and I appearing together in this anthology. We both attended Michigan although he didn't win no Hopwood, eh?”

Donald BeagleHis collection of poems, What Must Arise (LP Press @ Wake Forest University), has been nominated for the Roanoke-Chowan Poetry Award 2017.

Katie HartsockHer book, Bed of Impatiens, was a finalist for the 2017 Ohioana Award in poetry.

Tung-Hui was awarded the University of Michigan’s Henry Russel Award. Considered the University’s highest honor for faculty at the early to mid-career stages of their career, the Henry Russel Award is conferred annually to faculty members who have demonstrated an extraordinary record of accomplishment in scholarly research and/or creativity, as well as an excellent record of contributions as a teacher.

Randa Jarrar received the $5,000 2016 Story Prize Spotlight Award for Him, Me, Muhammad Ali (Sarabande Books).

The Diag, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jensenl/visuals/album/annarbor/

Awards

& Honors

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Bradford Kammin won the $2,000 Southern Indiana Review Mary C. Mohr Award in Fiction for his story “The One Good Thing About Las Vegas, Nevada.”

Laura KasischkeThe Guardian named her alongside of Nabokov and Thomas Mann in the list of the authors of the “Top Ten Authentic Romances. The book they spotlighted was her novel, Be Mine.Laura was awarded the Allan Seagar Collegiate Professorship in English Language and Literature. Her inaugural lecture was on December 5.

Nate Marshall won the 2017 New Writers Award in poetry for his collection, Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016). The prize was sponsored by the Great Lakes Colleges Association.

Patricia HooperSeparate Flights was awarded the 2017 Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry by the North Carolina Literary and Historical Society.

Sara Schaffwas a semifinalist in the Plays Inverse Press Unemerged Playwrights Contest this summer. She writes that she’s back in her home state, teaching at St. Lawrence University.

Mairead Small Staidis the 2017-18 George Bennett Fellow at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Courtney Faye Taylor was one of four poets who won the 2017 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. She received $500, publication of her work in Boston Review, and an invitation to give a reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.

Laurence W. Thomashas been named a Chancellor of the Poetry Society of Michigan.

Rosmarie Waldropwas the winner of the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for Gap Gardening: Selected Poems.

Joyce Winslowhas won the 2017 F.Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Award given by the F. Scott Fitzgerald Literary Festival in Rockville, MD where Fitzgerald and family are buried. Annie Proulx received the 2017 Honoree Award at the same ceremony on Oct. 21, 2017. Ms. Winslow has also received a 2018 Fellowship grant from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanitiesto write and gather together her much awarded short stories into a collection.

We’re very sad to have to report that Peter P. Pratt, winner of a 1985 Major Essay Award, died of pancreatic cancer on October 11 at the age of 59. His obituary in the Lansing State Journal noted: “Peter considered himself a lucky man, who found great satisfaction in many things. He took enormous pride in his company, Public Sector Consultants, where he spent over thirty years working with an impressive group of people committed to improving Michigan. He was particularly passionate about health care and early childhood issues, always advocating for those whose voices were not heard.”

Paisley Rekdal

Deaths

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Andrea Beauchamp Assistant Director Hopwood Awards

Program

Special Annoucements

Please help us to keep the Newsletter as accurate and up-to-date as possible by sending news of your publications and activities. Your friends would like to hear about you! If you have any news or information you would like me to share, we would be delighted to hear about it through ensorh@umich.edu but please remember to type “Hopwood” in the subject line so your message isn't deleted by mistake. The mailing address is 1176 Angell Hall, 435 S State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1003. The Hopwood Room’s phone number is 734-764-6296. The cutoff date for listings was November 30. If your information arrived after that, it will be included in our next newsletter in July. The cutoff date for that newsletter will be May 30.

Our thanks to all of you who have so generously donated copies of your books to the Hopwood Library. The special display of recent books by Hopwood winners always attracts a lot of attention. We appreciate your thoughtfulness very much and enjoy showing off your work to visitors.

The Hopwood Program has a web page address: lsa.umich.edu/hopwood/. Visit the English Department’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program site at lsa.umich.edu/writers.

I’m very grateful for all my time in this position. It’s wonderful to be surrounded by dedicated, engaging, bright young writers and to be able, though the generosity of Avery Hopwood and our other donors, to offer encouragement at a time when those writers are very grateful for the validation. I’ve loved spending time with you and following your activities. So do copy me (abeauch@umich.edu) on your messages to Hannah so I can continue to do that.

Do stop by to say hello to Hannah if you’re visiting Ann Arbor. All best wishes for a happy spring and summer.

Affectionately,

Thank you and Goodbye