Bob Hicok

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This Clumsy Living won Bob Hicok the 2008 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from Library of Congress. The Bobbitt Prize recognizes the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. Previous winners include James Merrill, Louise Gluck, A.R. Ammons, Kenneth Koch, Frank Bidart, Alice Fulton, B.H. Fairchild, and W.S. Merwin.
Bob is also the recipient, in 2008, of a Guggenheim Fellowship. The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awards fellowships to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Most recently, Bob has been awarded a Fellowship in Poetry from The National Endowment for the Arts.
Bob teaches in the MFA Program. |
This Clumsy Living
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University Distinguished Professor of English, Nikki Giovanni, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from Chicago Public Library. The award pays tribute to a writer whose work has helped enhance the public's awareness of the written word. Previous honorees include David Mamet, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut, and Joyce Carol Oates.
Nikki's best-selling new book, Hip Hop Speaks to Children, has won an NAPPA
Gold Award. Only 30 entries out of 375 were awarded the gold. NAPPA is
the National Parenting Publications Award.
Nikki Giovanni teaches in the MFA Program.
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Nick Kocz's (MFA 2009) short story, "Young Nihilist Seeks Other," was published in a recent issue of Gargoyle. Other stories are forthcoming in Beloit Fiction Journal and Shakespeare's Monkey Review. His story, "Monkey Tails," won NorthPoint's New Beginnings contest for post-apocalyptic fiction. Nick is the fiction editor for Sotto Voce. |
Nikki Giovanni

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Robert Walker (MFA 2010) was a featured poet in a recent issue of Mipoesias. He has new poems forthcoming in 5 AM, Knockout, and Limp Wrist. |
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Fred D'Aguiar

Fred D'Aguiar, Gloria D. Smith Professor of Africana Studies, has a new collection of poems, entitled Continental Shelf, forthcoming in 2009 from Carcanet Press. Fred's many prizes and awards include The Whitbread First Novel Award for The Longest Memory, The Guyana Fiction Prize, and The David Higham Prize.
Fred Teaches in the MFA Program.
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Rob Talbert (MFA 2111) has two poems forthcoming in The American Poetry Review. |
Erika Meitner

Erika Meitner has published poems recently in The Alaska Quarterly Review, Barn Owl Review, Blackbird, The Indiana Review, The Florida Review, Shenandoah, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Review. Her first collection of poems, Inventory at the All-night Drugstore, won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Erika teaches in the MFA Program.
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Ashley Nicole Montjoy (MFA 2111) has poems in Passages North and So to Speak: A Feminist Journal of Language and Art.
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Ed Falco

Ed Falco's latest novel, Saint John of the Five Boroughs, is forthcoming from Unbridled Books, Fall 2009. Ed has new short fiction forthcoming in Five Points, The Notre Dame Review, Prairie Schooner, and several anthologies, including Masters of Technique, an anthology of chess fiction. Ed teaches in the MFA Program.
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Manisha Sharma's (MFA 2009) short story, "Godhara," was published in Superficial Flesh: superficialflesh.com
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Jeff Mann

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Jeff’s collection of personal essays, Edge: Travels of an Appalachian Leather
Bear, was re-released by Lethe Press in Fall 2008. His poems, essays, and
fiction have recently appeared in Hamilton Stone Review, Blue Fifth Review,
Ashé Journal, Now and Then, Queer and Catholic, On the Meaning of Friendship
Among Gay Men, Best Gay Poetry 2008, and Best Gay Stories 2008. Upcoming work
will appear in Poetic Voices Without Borders 2, Second Person Queer, Knockout,
Anthology of Appalachian Writers 2009, and Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel.
Jeff’s first collection of short fiction, A History of Barbed Wire, won a
Lambda Literary Award.
Jeff teaches in the MFA Program. |
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Alice Shen (2009 MFA)

Alice's panel, "VT Playwrights Present New Monologues and Dialogues," has been accepted for the 2009 Associated Writing Programs annual convention in Chicago. Other VT MFAs on the panel include Robert Walker (2010), Josette Torres (2010) and Manisha Sharma (2009) |
VT Playwrights Upcoming 2009 AWP Panel in Chicago
"Playwriting has become more and more popular in MFA programs across
the country. Last spring, Virginia Tech English and Theatre
Departments collaborated to produce a 72-Hour New Play Festival,
featuring staged readings of 9 one-act plays written by MFA
playwrights, fiction writers, and poets. This panel hosts several of
those students, including some from current playwriting workshops at
VT. They will read monologues and dialogues from their new works,
dealing with a wide range of themes from the tragic, exploitive side
of dowry customs in India, to a comic, metaphysical exploration of
gender and sexuality."
The New River, the MFA Program's student-edited online journal of digital writing and art, has been selected by the Electronic Literature Organization for inclusion in the Library of Congress's Internet Archive Project. The Library of Congress will now provide a link to New River and periodically "crawl" our site to stay updated. The purpose of the project is to archive significant sites for future generations.
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The New River

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Unwavering, Poems by Gyorgyi Voros
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Gyorgyi Voros

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About Unwavering: "The poems in Gyorgyi Voros's Unwavering unfurl in the interstices between nature and culture, probing the human relationship to nonhuman nature as we live it now at the start of the twenty-first century. Of these poems, John Ashbery writes: "The music of Voros's poetry is, in Conrad Aiken's words, 'more than music'. It's the motion of life and lots of things in it thinking, changing one s mind, forgetting and remembering." Ann Lauterbach writes that "Voros demonstrates the gorgeous surfeit of the natural world. In sight and sound, the particulars of habitat come to life, almost breaking the confines of language, reaching for, but never quite attaining, the transcendent." |
Gyorgyi teaches undergraduate literature and creative writing courses, and conducts a creative writing practicum for MFA students.
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Matthew Vollmer
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Kate Kimball (2010 MFA) has a short story entitled "Simple, Ugly Things"in Weber: The Contemporary West.
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Weston Cutter (2009 MFA)
Weston's poem, "You Could Call It a Shift," was selected by Mark Strand for The Best New Poets 2008. Weston's was one of 50 poems selected from over 1300 submissions and nominations. He has new poems our or forthcoming in Boxcar Poetry Review, Controlled Burn, Hawai'i Pacific Review and Santa Clara Review, and he has a new short story forthcoming in Southern Indiana Review.
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Matthew Vollmer has placed his first book, the short story collection Future Missionaries of America, with the highly-regarded independent publishing house, McAdam Cage. It's scheduled for publication in February 2009. Stories in the collection have appeared in Paris Review, Tin House, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Portland Review, Fugue, Gulf Coast, and The Colorado Review.
Matthew is teaching our sophomore-level fiction workshop. |
Carrie Meadows (2009 MFA) has a new media composition entitled "Operation Voodoo" in CEllA's Round Trip, where she is also interviewed about her new media work . She has new poems in Anti-, Plainsong, and Night Train. Her poem, "William Mabrey," won the Plainsong Award. And she has story forthcoming in LITnIMAGE. |