The

Inside:

Editor Andrea BeauchampDesign Anthony Cece

Hopwood Newsletter Vol. LXIX, 2

http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/hopwood/

HOPWOODHOPWOOD

artor Andrea Beauchampr

This spring, the University of Michigan awarded an Honorary Degree to Jack O’Brien, He addressed the School of Music, Theatre & Dance graduates at their commencement on April 25 at the Power Center. The University’s news release noted:

“Jack O’Brien is recognized as one of the great directors in the history of the American stage. The breadth of his work ranges from the theaters of Broadway to opera houses, and from poignant dramas to witty comedies. The Saginaw native earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at U-M. Originally a pre-law student, he was tapped as a replacement for a lead role in ‘Carousel’—an experience that changed his life. While at U-M he earned a Hopwood Award [Major Drama, 1962] and authored an

award-winning jazz musical with his classmate Bob James. Originally writing lyrics and libretti for new musicals, as well as directing on Broadway, O’Brien distinguished himself in New York and at one of the nation’s greatest regional theaters, the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. He has been associated with the latter for 40 years, as a director of plays and as artistic director for more than 25 years, and now as artistic director emeritus. His credits include revivals of Shakespeare, new productions of contemporary dramas, and new musicals such as ‘The Full Monty’ and ‘Hairspray.’ He established himself in the world of opera with George Gershwin’s classic ‘Porgy and Bess,’ which was presented under his direction for the fi rst time with full original score and lyrics. O’Brien won Tony Awards as best director for ‘Hairspray’ (2003), ‘Henry IV’ (2004), and ‘The Coast of Utopia’ (2007), which has been widely praised as a landmark in theatrical history, winning a total of seven Tonys. O’Brien also directed television drama, including a pioneering telecast of Wilder’s ‘The Skin of Our Teeth.’ He won several Drama Desk Awards and in 2002 received the ‘Mr. Abbott’ Award for lifetime achievement in the theater. He was voted

Jack O’BrienU-M HONORARY

DEGREE RECIPIENTSPRING, 2008

Photo: Ari Mintz

June, 2008

Publications by Hopwood Winners-books and chapbooks-articles and essays-reviews-fi ction-poetry-fi lm-drama performances and publicationsNews NotesAwards and HonorsDeathsSpecial Announcements

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into the College of Fellows of the American Theatre in 1994, and earlier this year he was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.” Our warmest congratulations to Dr. O’Brien.

We are very happy to announce a new prize, The Roy and Helen Meador Writing Award, endowed by Dr. Helen Meador in memory of her husband. The award will be at the under-graduate level and was established “to acknowledge and support excellence in writing on the basis of demonstrated writing talent and demonstrated fi nancial need.” The fi rst award will be announced next January. We’re very grateful to Dr. Meador for endowing this new prize.

The awards for the Hopwood Underclassmen Contest were announced on January 29 by Professor Nicholas Delbanco of the English Department, Director of the Hopwood Program. The judges were Michael Dickman and Hopwood winners Derek Green, Carolyn Kraus, and Deanne Lundin. A fi ction reading by George Saunders, author of The Braindead Megaphone, Pastoralia, and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, followed the announcement of the awards. The winners were:Nonfi ction: Yue Ding, $600; Jessica Hoff man, $800; Noveed Safi pour, $1,250; Arshabh Sarda, $1,250Fiction: Lindy Lazar, $600; Cathy Song, $600; Keesha Hargrow, $800; Elise Rebecca Wanger, $1,500Poetry: Molly Gail Shannon, $600; Jennifer Sussex, $800; Jessi Holler, $1,750Other writing contest winners:The Academy of American Poetry Prize: Sarah M. Sala (Undergraduate Division), $100; Re-bekah Ann Oakes (Graduate Division), $100The Bain-Swiggett Poetry Prize: Rebecca Porte, $550The Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry: D’Anne Witkowski, $350; Kristie Kachler, $500The Jeff rey L. Weisberg Memorial Prize in Poetry: Jessi Holler, $650; Molly Gail Shannon, $650The Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship: Anna Prushinskaya, $1,000; Sarah M. Sala, $1,000; Beenish Ahmed, $2,000; Jessi Holler, $2,000; Carolyn Lusch, $2,000; Meghann Rotary, $2,000; Jessie Roy, $2,000. The judge for this contest was Amy Carroll.

The awards for the Graduate and Undergraduate Hopwood Contest were presented on April 16 by Professor Nicholas Delbanco. A lecture by Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, Soulcatcher and Other Stories, and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, followed the an-nouncement of the awards. Local judges for the contests were William Abernethy, Aaron Brzezina, Joseph Heininger, Brenda Marshall, Aaron McCollough, Katherine Mendeloff , OyamO, Terry Tinkle, Douglas Trevor, and Robert Whitman and Hopwood winners Richard Gallagher, Nicholas Harp, Christopher Hebert, Karyna McGlynn, Phoebe Nobles, Jennifer Metzker, Sharon Pomerantz, Sara Talpos, and Ann-Marie Thomas. National judges were:Drama: Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas and Ruth Margraff Novel: Neil Gordon (Hopwood winner) and Alix OhlinScreenplay: Rebecca Ewing and Elwood Reid (Hopwood winner)Nonfi ction: Leslie Garis and Christine Montross (Hopwood winner)Short Fiction: Adam Braver and Rosellen BrownPoetry: Campbell McGrath and Jill Allyn RosserThe Hopwood Award Theodore Roethke Prize: Brenda Hillman The winners were:Drama: Andrea M. Kurtz, $2,500; Kodi Scheer, $3,500 Jane E. Martin, $4,000; Seth Moore, $7,000Novel: Andrea M. Kurtz, $3,000; Ben Stroud, $3,000; Jarred M. Williams, $5,000; Tiana Ka-hakauwila, $6,000Screenplay: Aimée Carter, $2,500; Brendt Rioux, $3,000; Marc Zakalik, $3,500; Mitchell Aksel-rad, $6,000 Undergraduate Nonfi ction: Jonah Zaretsky, $2,500; Sarah M. Sala, $3,000; Karl Stampfl , $3,500; Beenish Ahmed, $6,000 Graduate Nonfi ction: Steven Woodward, $2,500; Jane E. Martin, $3,500; Lauren Pruneski, $3,500; Bradford Kammin, $6,000Undergraduate Short Fiction: $2,500 to Jordan D. Rossen, $2,500; Rebecca Poulson, $3,500;

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Margaret LeDuc, $7,000 Graduate Short Fiction: Sopang Men, $3,000; Dana Kletter, $3,500; Bradford Kammin, $7,500Hopwood Undergraduate Poetry: Carrie Luke, $6,000; Claire Smith, $8,000Graduate Poetry: Alana C. DeRiggi, $2,000; Elizabeth Gramm, $2,500; Rebecca Porte, $4,000; Amanda Carver, $6,000 The Hopwood Award Theodore Roethke Prize for the Long Poem or Poetic Sequence: Megan Levad, $5,000 Other writing contest winners:

The Kasdan Scholarship in Creative Writing (judged by Frank Beaver and the Kasdan Com-pany): Mitchell Akselrad, $6,500The Arthur Miller Award of the University of Michigan Club of New York Scholarship Fund (judged by Nicholas Allen Harp): Mitchell Akselrad, $2,000The Dennis McIntyre Prize for Distinction in Undergraduate Playwriting: Kathryn Giff ord, $2,500; Seth Moore, $2,500; Rebecca Poulson, $2,500The Chamberlain Award for Creative Writing Randa Jarrar, $3,000The Helen S. and John Wagner Prize: Amanda Carver, $900The Andrea Beauchamp Prize (donated by Professor John Wagner): Bradford Kammin, $900The John Wagner Prize: Bradford Kammin, $900 The Robert F. Haugh Prize: Margaret LeDuc, $2,300The Meader Family Award: Emily Mahan, $2,600; Alexandra Simpson, $2,600The Naomi Saferstein Literary Award: Seth Moore, $1,200The Leonard and Eileen Newman Writing Prizes: In Dramatic Writing: Keñata Martins, $1,000; In Fiction, Rebecca Adams, $1,000The Paul and Sonia Handleman Poetry Award: Claire Smith, $2,600The Geoff rey James Gosling Prize: Tiana Kahakauwila, $750The Stanley S. Schwartz Prize: Rebecca Poulson, $500The Helen J. Daniels Prize: Beenish Ahmed, $600

HOPWOOD AWARDS CEREMONIES

You are all cordially invited to attend next year’s awards ceremonies. The Hopwood Underclassmen Awards Ceremony will take place on Tuesday, January 27, with a fi ction reading by Tobias Wolff following the announcement of the awards. The Graduate and Undergraduate Awards Ceremony will be held on Wednesday, April 22, with a lecture by Ellen Bryant Voigt. She is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2007); Shadow of Heaven (2002), which was a fi nalist for the National Book Award; Kyrie (1995), a fi nalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award; Two Trees (1992); The Lotus Flowers (1987); The Forces of Plenty (1983); and Claiming Kin (1976). Both awards ceremonies will be held in the Rackham Amphitheatre at 3:30 p.m.

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Ellen Bryant VoightHOPWOOD LECTURER

APRIL, 2009Photo: Barry Goldstein

Tobias Wolff HOPWOOD READER

JANUARY, 2009Photo: Elena Seibert

4

with Bryan Albin Giemza, Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of Father Ryan, forthcoming from University of Tennessee Press, 2008. The blurb notes, “His verses, which investigated faith and propagated a romanticized view of the Southern cause, went through forty-seven editions by the 1930s, and Ryan himself became a near-mythical fi gure: the celebrated ‘Poet-Priest of the South.’”

Blood Pudding, stories, Esplanade Books, 2008.

East, West, and Beyond, poetry, Plain View Press of Austin, Texas, March 2007. The bookwas a New Mexico Book Award Finalist in 2007.

Sleigh Ride, poetry chapbook, Factory Hollow Press, 2008, www.factoryhollowpress.com.

The Soul of Creative Writing, Transaction Publishers, 2008.

Czeslaw Milosz: Memories and Recollections, forthcoming from Ohio University Press. Please note correction of publisher.

Lilies Without, poetry, Ausable Press, 2007.

The Open Heart Companion: Preparation and Guidance for Open-Heart Surgery Recovery, Foreword by Kathleen Blake, Open Heart Publishing, 2006. The book was a ForeWord Book of the Year fi nalist in the health category in 2006. It will be followed by a series of additional patient advocate “Com-panions” for other major surgery recoveries. Maggie also off ers a free open-heart surgery phone support group: www.openheartcoach.com.

Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, nonfi ction, Penguin, 2007.

Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement, Scribner, 2008.

Evening Is the Whole Day, a novel, Houghton Miffl in, 2008.

Moment of Comfort, A Congeries of Formal Verse, Pudding House Press, 2007.

Sheep Blast Off ! illustrated by Margot Apple, Houghton Miffl in, 2008.

How the Children Stopped the Wars, revised with Afterword, Tricycle Press, 2007; Pleasant Field-mouse, new edition HarperCollins, 2007. Jan writes: “Maurice Sendak had them go back to the original artwork to create a superior printing.” Forthcoming in Summer 2008: Bear Dance, illustrat-ed by Monique Felix (who also illustrated his The Enchanted Sled); Through a Lens Darkly: Adventures with Louise Brooks, Lillian Gish, Dolores Del Rio, Jackie Coogan, Leni Riefenstahl, Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, Mae West, Carl Th. Dreyer, Isak Dinesen and Others, nonfi ction.

The Left-Handed Story: Writing and the Writer’s Life (Writers on Writing), University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Far-Away Places: Lessons in Exile, nonfi ction, ARTZY Books, 2007.

has authored the Foreword for the new book just published by ALA Editions (publishing arm of the American Library Association), Transforming Library Service Through Information Commons: Case Studies for the Digital Age. He was also recently interviewed by the online journal Against the Grain.

“Clarity and Obscurity in Poetry,” American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, XXXIV, Spring 2008.

* Assume date unknown if no date is indicated.

Donald Robert Beagle

Art Corriveau

Gloria Dyc

Joe Fletcher

Richard Goodman

Cynthia Haven

Laura Kasischke

Maggie Lichtenberg (Margaret Klee Lichtenberg)

Christine Montross

Carl Oglesby

Preeta Samarasan

Laurence W. Thomas

Nancy Shaw

Jan Wahl

Nancy Willard

Howard R. Wolf

Donald Beagle

Sven Birkerts

Publications byHopwood Winners*

Articles and Essays

Books and Chapbooks

5

“The Male Priesthood: Wearing the Jewels of the Bride,” Homiletic & Pastoral Review, November 2007; “A Lenten Refl ection on the Beginning of the Passion of Christ,” published for the fi rst time in its entirety, Family Resources Center, Peoria Diocese, a portion having been published earlier in Linacre Quarterly.

“Living in a Post-National Math Panel World,” www. edspresso.com/2008/03/living in a postnational math.htm.

“How a writerly attitude led to success,” The Writer, January 2008; “Ian Fleming—The adventures of a British intelligence offi cer during World War II fueled the creation of the mythical spy James Bond,” WWII History, January 2008.

“In the Courtyard of Miracles and Wonders,” New York Times, Dec. 16, 2007; “A Retreat to Find Peace Before a New Venture,” Boston Globe, Jan. 6, 2008; “Walking the Great White Way,” Readerville Journal, Jan. 14, 2008.

“Three Women, Three Problems, Three Therapies,” October 2007, O the Oprah Magazine; “Why Therapy?” October 2007, O the Oprah Magazine; “All About Eve,” Good Housekeeping’s Blessings column, October 2007.

“My First Cat, Writers and Artists Remember,” compiled by Michelle Lovrie, Mamelok Press Ltd., Northern Way, Suff olk, England, 2007; “Poets Bookshelf II,” Contemporary Poets on Books that Shaped Their Art, edited by Peter Davis and Tom Koontz, Barnwood Press, 2008.

“Oocyte vitrifi cation—Women’s emancipation set in stone,” with R. Hombur and, F. van der Veen, Fertility & Sterility, 2008; “A series of monozygotic twins discordant for ovarian failure: ovary trans-plantation (cortical versus microvascular) and cryopreservation,” with M. DeRosa, J. Pineda, et al., Human Reproduction 2008.

“Marian,” an essay and story excerpt from Eat Our Words, edited by the Montana Committee for the Humanities, Farountry Press, 2006; “Divine Reading~Holy Writing,” Rules of Thumb, edited by Michael Martone and Susan Neville, Writer’s Digest, 2006; forthcoming in 2008, “Kishey,” creative nonfi ction, The Art of the Word, edited by Molly McQuade.

“Translation as Collaboration,” in Towards a Foreign Likeness Bent: Translation, Duration: Poetics 1, edited by Jerrold Shiroma; www.durationpress.com/poetics/translation.htm.

“Portrait of a Sissy,” The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2008.

“Bad Habit,” a review of Last Last Chance by Fiona Maazel, New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2008.

“A Diagnosis for Doctors,” a review of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam in the October 13, 2008 Washington Post Book Review.

“The Plot Against Britain,” a review of Resistance by Owen Sheers, New York Times Book Review, March 2, 2008; “Time Must Have a Stop,” a review of Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje, The Three-penny Review #113, Spring 2008.

A review of “On the Vanishing of Large Creatures” by MFA Program graduate Susan Hutton, Boston Review, March/April 2008; a review of Dog Language by Chase Twichell, Rattle, March 2008.

“A Great Civil War,” Bellevue Literary Review, Spring 2008.

In the “Shouts and Murmurs” column of The New Yorker: “Aesop in the City,” August 13, 2007, and “Monkey Do,” December 10, 2007.

Helen Ratner Dietz

Barry Garelick

Hervie Haufl er

David Masello

Christine Montross

Marge Piercy

Sherman J. Silber

Melanie Rae Thon

Keith Waldrop

Edmund White

Joshua Henkin

Christine Montross

Jess Row

Matthew Thorburn

Jessica Apple

Yoni Brenner

Reviews

Fiction

6

“The Holographic Soul,” Michigan Quarterly Review, Winter 2008.

“The One O’Clock Movie,” Alaska Quarterly Review, Winter 2007.

“Trick,” Subtropics, Issue 6, May 2008.

“The World in Flames,” Witness, XXI, 2007.

“Borden’s Meat Biscuit,” Subtropics, Winter/Spring 2008.

“The Wall,” forthcoming in Northwoods Journal, Thomaston, Maine.

“Rika, Marika: Love Song for Griffi n,” Crazyhorse LXXII, 9, 2007; “A Song Unbroken,” Conjunctions 49: A Writers’ Aviary, 2007; “Valadez,” Salt Flats Annual, Issue Two, 2007; “For the Son of a Childless Mother,” Unbound Press, I, 2006; “Translation,” SmokeLong Quarterly, Issue 14, 2006, smokelong.com/fl ash/4011.asp; “Confession for Raymond Good Bird,” rpt. in Best Stories of the American West, edited by Mark Jaff e, Forge, 2007 and in Pushcart Prize XXXII: Best of the Small Presses, 2008; “Xmas, Jamaica Plain,” rpt. in The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, second edition, edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone, 2008; “Heavenly Creatures: for wandering children and their delinquent mother,” rpt. in Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories from the Left Hand of God, edited by Linda Wen-dling, Hourglass Books, 2007; “Letters in the Snow: for kind strangers and unborn children~for the ones lost and most beloved,” rpt. in Peculiar Pilgrims: Stories from the Left Hand of God and by the DHC Corporation, Tokyo, Japan, as part of a contest for new translators, 2007. Forthcoming in 2008: “Love Song for the Mother of No Children, Virginia Quarterly Review, Summer; “Saviors,” Glimmer Train, Summer; “River’s Edge,” Image, Summer; “Silent Snow, Singing Sparrow,” Idaho Review, March; “Tu B’Shvat: for the drowned and the saved,” www.drumlummon.org.

“From Hotel de Dream,” Ontario Review, No. 67, 2007.

“Twins,” Cutbank 67, Spring 2007. He has also had poems in The Diagram, Fourteen Hills, and Par-thenon West Review.

“Breadfruit,” “Fancy Buttons,” “Earth Night,” OctopusMagazine #10, octopusmagazine.com.

“‘One More Than One,’” Shenandoah, Winter 2007.

“$8 Towels,” MiPOesias, April 2008; “Claim Money You Never Knew You Had,” “The Funky Monkey Hug,” “Footbinder’s Dream,” “The Small Machine Is Working Again,” why vandalism? March 2008; “A Tie Is a Beautiful Noose,” “I Thought You Might Like This,” “Übermarket,” ChicagoPoetry.com, January 2008; “Cure for Lonleyness [sic],” “Secret Room Above McDonald’s,” Sliced Bread #1, May 2007.

“Three at 4:43,” The Threepenny Review #113, Spring 2008.

“Night in Breath Marks,” “Passage,” Spinning Jenny #10, 2008.

“Kubota Writes to José Arcadio Buendia,” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Winter 2008.

“We Watch My Father Try to Put On His Shirt,” “Memory of Grief.” “My Son Practicing the Violin,” The Southern Review, Spring 2008.

“Two Dreams About My Father,” Third Coast, Fall 2007.

“Impounded by the Sea,” Shenandoah, Winter 2007.

“What It Cost,” “How Tulips Invented Jazz,” The Kenyon Review, Spring 2008.

“I Trisected the Bull’s Bladder in the Lavender,” “Somebody Shook Me: Wake Up It’s Raining Oil,” OctopusMagazine #10, octopusmagazine.com.

Poetry

Danielle Lazarin

Michael Murray

Celeste Ng

Jess Row

Ben Stroud

Laurence W. Thomas

Melanie Rae Thon

Edmund White

Brent Armendinger

Jason Bredle

Victoria Chang

Larry O. Dean

David Gewanter

Rae Gouirand

Garrett Hongo

Laura Kasischke

Eric Leigh

Laurence Lieberman

Deanne Lundin

Karyna McGlynn

7

“Equivalents,” The Kenyon Review, Spring 2008.

“The Conversation,” “A Dry Heavy Cold,” “The Ones I Never Give to Goodwill,” Mobius, The Poetry Magazine, 25th Edition, Volume XXII, 2007; “Timeless,” The Cortland Review, Issue #36, August 2007; “The King of Swords Enacts the Final Sentence,” Visions International Double 7 (77), Black Buzzard Press, 2007; “Lurid Fields,” “Metamorphosis,” The Connecticut Review, Spring 2007; “We once were slaves,” Poetry Agon, 2007; “Film can reverse but not time,” Mainstay, January 2008; “Early spring in the garden shed,” “Childhood without programming,” Barnwood, February 2008.

“Amor on Display,” Indiana Review, Winter 2007.

“On the Return, in March, of a Flock of Geese,” Poesis, Summer 2007.

fi ve poems in The Old Mill Anthology, Spring 2008; fi ve poems in the online journal Concelebratory Shoehorn, Issue #19, 2008.

“Elegy: November Morning,” “Survivor,” Fugue #33, 2007.

“Driving Out to Innisfree,” Barn Owl Review, Issue 1, January 2008. The poem was also featured on Verse Daily on February 20th; “Every Possible Blue,” “Facts about Islands,” “One Tradition,” Diode, May 2008.

was “Spotlight Poet” for the week of March 26, 2007 on the site of the Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org. “Before the fi rst evening,” Vacarme 41 (Paris), Fall 2007, French translation by Eric Houser; translated “A Voyage to Cythera” by Charles Baudelaire, Poetry Daily, September 6, 2007, www.poems.com.

“Imaginary Landscape Number, IV,” Aber dabei (Copenhagen), 2007; “Our Moments,” Tuesday: An Art Project, 2, Fall 2007. Translated the following: “The Bone Saw” by Werner Dürrson, Aufgabe 6, Spring 2007; “a louse,” “if you,” “thou supermaster” by H. C. Artmann, Bombay Gin 33, 2007; “quisite mo-ment” by Anne Portugal, Verse 24, nos. 1-3, 2007; “Lingos III” by Ulf Stolterfoht, The Canary 6, Spring 2007; “Lingos V” by Ulf Stolterfoht, NO: A Journal of the Arts 6, 2007; “Lingos II” by Ulf Stolterfoht, Coconut 9, July 2007.

Sections from their abecedary collaboration Flat With No Key appeared in: MiPOesias, September 2007 (M P Q) (and also on its website); The Green Integer Review 9, 2007 (A D E G L) and also on its website; Beard of Bees, December 2007 (I J K R S T U V), www.beardofbees.com.

Over the summer, she and her husband “completed Robinson, the ninth fi lm in our series using poetry to tell the story of Simón Bolívar. It premiered in October at the Los Angeles Latino Interna-tional Film Festival to a sold-out theatre and was warmly received.”

“In collaboration news, I provided the text for ‘the heart strobed superimposed.’ an experimental fi lm by Liz Stephens with music by composer Matt Sargent. The text is a new poem called ‘Moving Image #1 [the heart strobed superimposed]’ commissioned especially for this project. The fi lm premiered the evening of April 1st during the ‘Music and the Moving Image’ program at the Hartt School in Hartford. The event was part of the Hartford Sound Alliance and Liz mixed in the audio of us reading the text while Matt Sargent performed his soundtrack.”

The Life Before Her Eyes, the movie based on Laura’s novel by the same name, opened on April 18. It stars Evan Rachel Wood, Eva Amurri, and Uma Thurman and was directed by Vadim Perelman.

was married on Feb. 26, 2008, and changed her name from to Lizzi Wolf. Her play, The Strawberry & the Kaiser, is one of 2 winners of this year’s Ann Arbor Civic Theatre New Play Contest, and is sched-uled for a staged reading by the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre in July 2008.

Derek Mong

Marge Piercy

Paisley Rekdal

Edwin Sauter, Jr.

Laurence W. Thomas

Melanie Rae Thon

Matthew Thorburn

Keith Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop

Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop

Tina Datsko de Sánchez

Matthew Hittinger

Laura Kasischke

Liz Brent

Film

Drama Performances and Publications

8

A solo play Cat Lady ran at Dixon Place Theater in NYC in August, and was presented by Tribes Magazine at The Living Theater, sponsored by Poets & Writers. His musical Looking for Limbo, co-written by Erin Markey, was presented at HERE’s American Living Room Festival and his and Mike Enright’s short, “When the Cigarette is Over,” premiered at the opening of the 20th Annual MIX Festival in NYC. His production number “Poor Francine” was performed in the cabaret series Weimar New York (to a standing ovation). He visited the U of M School of Art this past year as a Witt Artist in Residence, hosted by Holly Hughes, and participated in The Lincoln Center Directors Lab as a playwright, working with fellow Hopwood recipient Brian Lobel. Joseph also appeared as a principal in the run of composer John Moran’s new music-theater piece, What if Saori Had a Party, at Performance Space 122.

has written a play that was performed in February and March called Some Things Are Private at Trin-ity Repertory Theater in Providence, RI. The play is about the controversy surrounding the work of the photographer Sally Mann.

There was a sneak preview of his musical A Good Boy at The Players’ Theater in NYC. There was a New York workshop of the musical in the spring.

will be starting a tenure-track position at Pitzer College in Claremont, California in the fall. He will teach creative writing and literature.

is now the Director/Writer-in-Residence of the Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts. “Shake Rag Alley is a historic mining village on 2.5 acres in beautiful Mineral Point, an artist’s community in the hills of Southwestern Wisconsin. I will be starting a creative writing program there, complete with a reading series, short and extended residencies for working writers and artists, writing workshops for adults and youth, and various literacy adventures, including a tutoring/mentoring program for young writers. I also hope to launch the fi rst annual Shake Rag Alley Writer’s Conference in 2009. We already off er some very cool workshops in the visual, literary, and traditional arts, as well as drama and fi lm. In addition, we have an outdoor theatre, the Alley Stage, which features premiere works by contemporary playwrights from across the nation. We also off er some very nice digs for overnight stays, and should have a local fare cafe open soon. So please consider stopping in on your book tours, teaching a workshop at Shake Rag, or coming to Mineral Point for the writer’s conference. If you live in the area, it’s a great weekend getaway with kids or without--come see a play, take a workshop, etc.”

continues to write a monthly column on fi lm, “Talking about Movies,” for Michigan Today. His March column was on courtroom drama, including Anatomy of a Murder, set in Michigan, and may be read at: http://michigantoday.umich.edu/2008/mar/movies.php?tr=y&auid=3462198.

has joined the staff of Third Wednesday literary arts journal as associate editor (thirdwednesday.org).

“A friend at church asked her to write a text for an artist book; so as a Lenten practice she wrote Thirty Poems of Longing for God. These were made into a beautiful, handcrafted book that was auc-tioned at a church fundraiser for a summer day camp for inner city kids. Seven of the poems were set to music by our composer friend Stan Dewitt.”

writes that he has begun work on his third solo album, Good Grief. “Still waiting on a release date for my band, the Injured Parties’ debut, Fun with a Purpose, hopefully by this fall. I have compiled an e-book of selected poems from out-of-print chapbooks, as well as a handful of previously uncol-lected work, in PDF format. larry@larryodean.com if people want a copy.”

will teach creative writing as an Assistant Professor at University of Tennessee, Knoxville, starting this fall.

had a cameo role as a restaurant hostess in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. The fi lm was directed by her husband, Nicholas Stoller, produced by Judd Apatow, and starred Jason Segel, Kristen Bell, Russell Brand, and Mila Kunis.

Joseph Keckler

Deborah Salem Smith

Brian Spitulnik

Brent Armendinger

Dean Bakopoulos

Frank Beaver

Alex Cigale

Tina Datsko de Sánchez

Larry O. Dean

Margaret Dean

Francesca Delbanco

& NotesNews

9

was appointed Regents’ Professor of English at the University of New Mexico in April, 2007.

will direct a workshop, “Stepping into the Scene: How to Write with the Full Imagination,” at the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Northern Michigan, May 29-June 2. She is now an Associate Pro-fessor at the U of M, with a split appointment between the English Department and the Residential College. There is a faculty profi le of Laura in the Spring 2008 LSA Magazine.

was named director of the New England Literature Program at the University of Michigan. NELP is a spring term academic program that takes place off campus at Camp Wohelo on Sebago Lake in Maine. UM faculty and other staff teach the courses and work closely with the students, “reading New England authors, writing, and exploring the New England countryside, its people, culture, and history.” This is a wonderful program and many Hopwood Award winners studied at NELP.

will direct a workshop, “Fiction and Painting(s),” at the Bear River Writers’ Conference in Northern Michigan, May 29-June 2.

has recently assumed a new position as Senior Editor and Men’s Fashion Editor at Town & Country magazine.

will be an Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago in the fall. Columbia is the largest and most diverse private arts and media college in the nation and focuses on “innovation in the Visual, Performing, Media, and Communication Arts.”

will be an Assistant Professor at Colgate beginning this fall. He will teach creative writing.

moderated a panel discussion on February 12 in NYC titled “Do the ‘Ayes’ Have It? A Post-‘Super Tuesday’ Look Again at Vote-Counting Technology and Election Integrity.” The event was sponsored by The New York State County Lawyers’ Association’s Cyberspace Law Committee.

wrote in April: “We sold Leapfrog Press a couple of months ago, although we have kept an imprint that will probably be called ‘Herring River Books.’ Ten years of running a small press exhausted us. I’m presently writing a non-fi ction book for Basic Books. I will be in Detroit at Wayne State University on October 17th doing a 50-minute reading on Friday evening and also a craft talk and discussion session on Friday afternoon.”

is working at Harvard in the library of the Law School. He is also attending the MFA Program at Emerson College in Boston.

“The news here is that I’ve published poems, translations, and prose recently in the Michigan Quarterly Review (an essay on Berryman and Pound), Poetry Northwest (translations of poems by Yves Bonnefoy and then, when one of the translations was put on-line as part of PN’s fundraiser, a defense of one of the translations), Threepenny Review (another translation of a poem by Bonnefoy), Poetry Daily, and on Slate, the on-line magazine. Another poem of mine, this one about a student I taught a few years ago, will appear on Slate on Feb. 19. And I wrote an afterword to Lee Gerlach’s Selected Poems (Ohio U. Press). Lee won a Major Hopwood in Poetry in the 50s. Handsel Books, my imprint at Other Press, is doing well. Among other things, Other Press is now an affi liate of Random House. One of the recent Handsel titles, Antoine Wilson’s The Interloper, has been included on several best novels of the year lists. Other new Handsel titles include Farewell, Shanghai and Isaac’s Torah, two novels by the Bulgarian novelist Angel Wagenstein.”

“I am delivering two lectures on ‘Discipline in Poetry’ and ‘What the Poem Doesn’t Say’ at the Lucidity Poets’ Retreat in Eureka Springs, Arkansas in April.”

“In March the Lexington (KY) Ballet will do again the 45-minute ballet based on my Cabbage Moon, which a German composer independently has set to music and is now being recorded.”

writes that Catherine Imbriglio’s book, Parts of the Mass, received the Norma Faber 1st Book Award of the Poetry Society of America. It was published by Keith and Rosmarie’s press, Burning Deck, in 2007.

was “Sanders Writer-in-Residence” at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, March 11-17, 2007.

Gloria Dyc

Laura Kasischke

Aric Knuth

Elizabeth Kostova

David Masello

Nami Mum

Patrick O’Keeffe

Allan Pearlman

Marge Piercy

Ian Singleton

Harry Thomas

Laurence W. Thomas

Jan Wahl

Keith Waldrop

Rosmarie Waldrop

10

won this year’s Ben Prize at the University of Michigan. The Ben Prize was established in 2007 in honor of Laurence Kirschbaum and was made possible through the generosity of Bradley Meltzer and a group of donors to promote the teaching of good writing. Two exceptional lecturers are chosen each year for their work with students to improve writing skills. This award includes a mon-etary stipend. The nominations for this award come from students.

was named a 2008 Fellow in fi ction by the Guggenheim Foundation. Dean is a writer in Mineral Point, Wisconsin; Executive Director and Lillian Greenwood Artist-in-Residence, Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts, Mineral Point.

In October, Dictionary of Film Terms was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

won a $600 Cohen Award, sponsored by Ploughshares magazine, for her poem “Proof.”

was named winner of Hidden River’s William Van Wert Fiction Award for his story “In Vidia.”

is the winner of the 2007 Happy Hour Poetry Award for his poem “O h i o—.” He received $1,500 and his poem was published in Alehouse 2008.

Her book, Body of Work: Meditations on Mortality from the Human Anatomy Lab, was named one of the Washington Post’s best nonfi ction books of 2007.

The Library of Michigan has chosen Raccoon Tune as the Michigan Reads! book for 2008. Michigan Reads! is a one-state, one-children’s-book program devoted to increasing early childhood literacy, with programming, events, and author visits slated to take place throughout September 2008.

received a National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Fiction Writing, 2008-2009; “Saviors,” Glimmer Train, fi rst place winner of the Very Short Fiction contest; Research Fellowship for 2009, Tanner Humanities Center, University of Utah.

was selected by Poet Laureate Charles Simic for a 2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. The fellowship is $10,000 and Matthew read at the Library of Congress on March 6.

was named a 2008 Fellow by the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a writer and translator, St. Helena, California; Professor Emeritus of Latin American Literature, Michigan State University; and author of Jorge Luis Borges: A life in letters.

William “Buck” Dawson, recipient of a Major Essay Award in 1957, died on April 4, 2008 in Ft. Lau-derdale. He was 87. He was awarded 17 decorations including the Bronze Star and French Medal of Honor in WWII and was a special assistant to the Director of the Peace Corps in the 1970’s. He was chosen as the International Swimming Hall of Fame‘s fi rst executive director in 1963 and became the fi rst president of the International Sports Heritage Association, which is now a 136 member organization of Sports Halls of Fame. With his wife RoseMary, he helped run family camps Ak-o-Mak (for girls) and Chikopi (for boys), the world’s fi rst competititive swimming camps. His books include: Stand Up and Hook Up: A WWII Novel, A Civil War Artist at the Front: Edwin Forbes’ Life Studies of the Great Army, When the Earth Explodes: Volcanoes and the Environment, and Weissmuller to Spitz: The First 21 Years of the International Swimming Hall of Fame. He was inducted into the Interna-tional Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame as a coach/contributor and into his own International Swimming Hall of Fame as a contributor following retirement in 1986. A press release notes: “For a person who could not swim, Buck did more for swimming than any non-swimmer in the world.”

Richard H. Mattox, winner of a Minor Essay Award in 1935, died at the age of 92 on January 28, 2008. After serving in the Army in WWII he was named director of personnel for the NYS De-partment of Health, where he later served as chief health planning consultant. He was a public administration advisor for the US Department of State in Iran, and taught at Russell Sage College, where he launched a master of science in public service program. In 1982, he became a mentor at Empire State College, a position he held until his retirement at 80. While at the U of M, he started a housing cooperative and was later founder of an Albany food co-op and a Slingerlands nursery

Peggy Adler and Louis Cicciarelli

Dean Bakopoulos

Frank Beaver

Victoria Chang

Gregory Loselle

Derek Mong

Christine Montross

Nancy Shaw

Melanie Rae Thon

Matthew Thorburn

Donald A. Yates

Awards& Honors

Deaths

11

school. In 1996, he received the Charles Evans Hughes Award for outstanding administration in state government from the American Society for Public Administration.

John A. Merewether of East China, Michigan, died last year. He was the winner of a Minor Poetry Award in 1945 and a Major Drama Award in 1946.

Grace E. Potter, winner of a 1940 Major Drama Award, died on May 8, 2006. She was a resident of Dublin, Ohio.

Harriet Stolorow, winner of a Major Poetry award in 1968, died in Encinitas, CA on August 24, 2007. She was a former English Professor at Jackson Community College in Jackson, Michigan.

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.

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! You could write, fax (using the English Department’s number, 734-763-3128) or e-mail me: abeauch@umich.edu. Important: if e-mailing, please type HOPWOOD in the subject line so your message isn’t

deleted by mistake. The Hopwood Room’s phone number is 734-764-6296. The cutoff date for list-ings was April 23. If your information arrived after that, it will be included in our next newsletter which will come out in January.

Unfortunately, so many of you have personal websites and blogs that we’ll be unable to make note of them in the future. We’re trying to keep the newsletter to manageable size.

Looking for a writers’ conference, center, residency, or retreat to attend? The Writers’ Conferences and Centers (WC&C) website, www.writersconf.org, provides information about the most estab-lished and respected writing organizations in North America and abroad.

The Hopwood Program has a Web page address: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/hopwood/. Visit the English Department’s MFA Program site at http://www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa.

Best wishes for a happy summer. Do stop by to say hello if you’re visiting Ann Arbor.

Andrea Beauchamp

Special Announcements

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