NCWN

Registration is now open for the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s 2009 Squire Summer Writing Residency.

This year’s Summer Residency will be held Friday–Sunday, July 24–26, at Warren Wilson College outside Asheville, NC.

The Squire Summer Writing Residency is open only to the first fifty registrants, who can choose one of the following workshops: Poetry with Cathy Smith Bowers, Fiction with Tommy Hays, or Creative Nonfiction with Catherine Reid.

Cathy Smith Bowers’s work has appeared in publications such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Gettysburg Review, the Georgia Review, Poetry, the Southern Review, and the Kenyon Review. She served for many years as poet-in-residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where she received the 2002 J. B. Fuqua Distinguished Educator Award. She now teaches in the Queens low-residency MFA in Creative Writing Program, and at conferences throughout the United States.

Bowers is the author of three collections of poetry: The Love That Ended Yesterday in Texas, Texas Tech University Press, 1992; Traveling in Time of Danger, Iris Press, 1999; and A Book of Minutes, Iris Press, 2004. A fourth collection, The Candle I Hold Up to See You,is forthcoming from Iris Press.

Tommy Hays's latest novel, The Pleasure Was Mine, was chosen for the One City, One Book program in Greensboro and for the Amazing Read—Greenville, SC’s, first community read. Read on NPR’s “Radio Reader,” it was a finalist for the SIBA 2006 Fiction Award. His other novels are Sam’s Crossing and In the Family Way, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. He is executive director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and lecturer in the Master of Liberal Arts Program at UNC-Asheville.

Catherine Reid is an award-winning essayist and author of Coyote: Seeking the Hunter in Our Midst (Houghton Mifflin), one of Bookloft’s “top twenty bestsellers for 2006.” Other work has appeared in such journals as Massachusetts Review, Green Mountains Review, Bellevue Literary Review, and Isotope: A Journal of Literary Nature and Science Writing, where she was the featured writer for their inaugural issue. She teaches at Warren Wilson College, where she specializes in creative nonfiction.

The NCWN’s Squire Summer Writing Residency offers an intensive course in a chosen genre, as well as a panel discussion on publishing and bookselling, and readings by faculty and registrants. Attendees take meals together on campus, and are encouraged—but not required—to stay in Warren Wilson campus housing that will be set aside for this conference.

“The form of the Summer Residency provides a heightened sense of collegiality, a sense that you’re not alone,” said NCWN Executive Director Ed Southern.

The Squire Summer Writing Residency is named in honor of the late Chick and Elizabeth Daniels Squire, whose support made the residency possible.

More information about the Squire Summer Writing Residency can be found at www.ncwriters.org, or by calling 336-293-8844.

CULLOWHEE, NC – Catherine Carter, an assistant professor of English at Western Carolina University, has won the 2009 Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network.

Acclaimed poet Sarah Lindsay chose Carter’s poem “Toast” from close to 100 entries.

“It has a greater energy and rhythm . . . creates tension with a split viewpoint, and maintains the imagery throughout,” Lindsay said.

Carter will receive a $200 prize from the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and her winning poem will be considered for publication in the literary journal The Crucible.

Carter was “raised by wolves and vultures on the Eastern Shore of Maryland,” and now lives with her husband in Cullowhee, where she coordinates the English education program at Western Carolina University.  Her work has appeared in Poetry, North Carolina Literary Review, Tar River, Main Street Rag, and Cider Press Review, among others.  She will have work in the upcoming Best American Poetry 2009, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart prize.  Her first book, The Memory of Gills (LSU Press, 2006), won the 2007 Roanoke-Chowan Award.  Her chapbook, The Swamp Monster at Home, is currently circulating.

Poets selected for honorable mention were Marjorie Hudson, Jeff Miles, Rebecca Warren, and Mary Elizabeth Parker.

The Randall Jarrell Poetry Competition honors the work and legacy of the poet and critic Randall Jarrell, who taught at what is now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for nearly 18 years.  The competition is administered by Terry L. Kennedy and the graduate program in creative writing at UNCG, and is open to any writer who is a legal resident of North Carolina or a member of the North Carolina Writers’ Network.  Visit www.ncwriters.org for more information on this and other contests.

Ravenel selected the winners from a group of nine finalists sent to her by preliminary judge, David Radavich of Eastern Illinois University. The other six finalists were Samantha Talley of San Antonio, TX, for “The Mermaids Singing”; C. Stuart Wright of Ruffin, NC, for “Murdering Edna”; Ann McMurray Simpson of Knoxville, TN, for “Robert’s Shadow”; Julia Davis of Durham, NC, for “Revive Us Again”; Kurt Corriher of China Grove, NC, for “The Caretaker”; and Robert McCall of Saluda, NC, for “Ash Wednesday.”

Ravenel, the editor of The Best American Short Stories series for 13 years and the founding editor, with Louis Rubin, of Algonquin Press, praised Carter’s story: “Based on a brilliant premise, this story is perfectly executed to make the most of that premise and convincingly characterize the three players.” Carter, having retired from Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL, is now adjunct professor of Social Medicine, College of Medicine, UNC-Chapel Hill, and, part-time, a massage therapist specializing in cancer patients. He has written articles, poems, stories and full-length books about ways in which literature and the humanities can help medical patients. He has an A.B. in Humanities from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Comp. Lit from the University of Iowa, with supporting courses in the Writers’ Workshop.

Anne Barnhill, the first runner-up for “Dickhead,” is the author of a memoir, At Home in the Land of Oz: Autism, My Sister and Me.  Her short story collection, What You Long For, is forthcoming from Main Street Rag Publishing Co. in May of this year. She holds an M.F.A. in creating writing from UNC-Wilmington. Ravenel calls her story “a daring first person narrative that overcomes what could have turned raunchy or crude. Originality and finesse work beautifully here.”

Bill Morris, the second-runner up for “Shack on Fire,” writes a story, says Ravenel, “about place and its hold on human beings” in which “setting is the protagonist, and the author manages the twist nicely.”  He divides his time between Durham and the soundside village of Straits in “Down East” Carteret County. The Core Sound area is the setting for his first novel, Saltwater Cowboys, as well as for his story, “Dinah’s Dog,” the winner of the 2003 Doris Betts Prize for short fiction.