Patricia Hooper Wins 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award

  Patricia Hooper, of Gastonia, North Carolina, has been selected as winner of the 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award by the editors of Tampa Review. Her new poetry manuscript, Separate Flights, will be published in 2016 by the University of Tampa Press and the poet will be invited to read on the University of Tampa campus after the book is published next year. 

The Anita Claire Scharf Award is given to support publication of a book of poetry submitted to the annual Tampa Review Prize competition that speaks to aspects of the journal’s mission to praise and celebrate the beauty and diversity of the natural world; to illuminate the interconnectedness of our global environment; and to affirm the interrelatedness of visual and verbal art. The award is named in honor of Anita Scharf, the founding editorial assistant, and later associate and contributing editor, of Tampa Review who helped define the aesthetic and global values that are part of the journal’s mission. 

“Patricia Hooper’s collection quite literally lifts off,” said Richard Mathews, editor of Tampa Review, who worked with Scharf on the journal for more than seventeen years. “Anita always stressed the importance of enlarging awareness, stretching for a larger vision. This brilliant and lyrical manuscript uses metaphors of flight—including birds and planes and art— to explore and express the larger vision. And as a dedicated bird-watcher, Anita would also have appreciated each species Hooper introduces—and she would have loved the varieties of flight that she includes.” 

Patricia Hooper is the author of three previous books of poetry: Other Lives (Elizabeth Street Prees, 1984), At the Corner of the Eye (Michigan State University Press, 1997), and Aristotle’s Garden (Bluestem Press/Emporia State University, 2004).  She is also the author of a chapbook, The Flowering Trees, (State Street Press, 1995) and four children's books. Her poetry has appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Poetry, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review.

A graduate of the University of Michigan, where she earned BA and MA degrees, Hooper has been the recipient of The Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Bluestem Award for Poetry, a Writer’s Community Residency Award from the National Writer’s Voice, and the Laurence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review.

“This manuscript is musical and powerful in its impact—virtually symphonic in its shape and scope,” Mathews adds.  “From early poems like “Flying to Nantucket” and “The Heron at Wild Oak Bay” to later complex and layered works like “Monet Paints the Willows” and “Telling Time,” this beautifully structured manuscript is one that Anita would have cheered at every turn.  We are looking forward to sharing it with a broad spectrum of readers.” 

The Anita Claire Scharf Award is selected by the editors of Tampa Review from among the manuscripts submitted to the annual prize competition. Submissions for next year’s awards are now being accepted. 

To be eligible, authors are asked to submit a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review, who are members of the faculty at the University of Tampa. There is a contest fee of $25, but each submitter receives a complimentary one-year subscription to Tampa Review. Entries must follow published guidelines and must be postmarked by December 31, 2015. All entries will be considered for both the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and the Anita Claire Scharf Award.

Complete guidelines are available at www.ut.edu/tampareview or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Tampa Review Prizes, University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606.

The Official Release of Steve Kowit’s Cherish

Today is the Autumn Equinox and the ideal publication day for poet Steve Kowit’s Cherish: New and Selected Poems. Steve celebrated excess and delight, but he particularly praised balance, and this day balanced at the turn from summer to fall, a symbolic day of equal light and dark, would have pleased Steve as the official publication date for a host of complex and inexplicable reasons.  Even after seven books, he had not lost his sense of pleasure at the arrival of a new proofs, a new printed book, or a new season of the year. Though he passed away suddenly in his sleep on April 2 and never held his latest finished book in his hands, he gathered and arranged these new and selected poems with care and attention. We are glad to know that readers can now share the experience described perfectly by Dorianne Laux: “How fine to have in our hands . . . the lucid, voluptuous, exuberant poems of Steve Kowit.”

Cherish: New and Selected Poems

– by Steve Kowit –

Available in both paperback and hardback editions

Michelle Boisseau Wins 14th AnnualTampa Review Prize for Poetry

 

Michelle Boisseau

     Michelle Boisseau, of Kansas City, Missouri, has been named winner of the 2015 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Boisseau receives the fourteenth annual prize for her new manuscript, Among the Gorgons. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and trade paperback book publication in 2016 by the University of Tampa Press.
     Boisseau’s previous books of poetry include A Sunday in God-Years (University of Arkansas Press, 2009); Trembling Air (University of Arkansas Press, 2003), a PEN USA finalist; Understory, which received the Morse Prize (Northeastern University Press, 1996); and No Private Life (Vanderbilt, 1990). She has also twice been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.
     Tampa Review judges commented that the poems in Among the Gorgons make “graceful and unexpected leaps from personal to mythic, tender to satiric, and tragic to comic in poems that elude predictability and command attention.”
     “The voice constantly surprises us with strength in unexpected places,” the judges said. “Boisseau shapes irony into an energetic force. Best of all, the poems work individually—they satisfy and stand fully on their own—while at the same time gathering force and resonance as the book moves confidently into a whole that is greater than its parts.”
     Three of the poems from Among the Gorgons have appeared on Poetry Daily. Other new poems have appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, Yale Review, Hudson Review, Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, Missouri, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Miramar, New Ohio Review, and others.
     Boisseau earned BA and MA degrees from Ohio University and a PhD from the University of Houston. She is Professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she is also Senior Editor of BkMk Press and Contributing Editor of New Letters. Her university textbook, Writing Poems (Longman), initiated by the late Robert Wallace, is now in its eighth edition, with her colleague Hadara Bar-Nadav. She lives in Kansas City with her fellow Royals fan, her husband Tom Stroik, an internationally renowned linguist who writes on poetics, syntax, and the evolution of human language.
     Boisseau says that she nearly missed the contest deadline with her manuscript.
     “I believe I sent my manuscript at almost the last minute,” she says. “We had been in California visiting friends and family at Christmas. We got in late on the afternoon of December 31, and before we headed out the door for a New Year’s dinner celebration with friends, I managed to take a few minutes to get Among the Gorgons submitted. I pushed myself to take the chance, and what a fabulous result.”

The judges also announced twelve outstanding finalists this year:

     Ron De Maris of Miami, Florida, for “Spoor”;
     Diane Glancy of Shawnee Mission, Kansas, for “The Collector of Bodies”;
     Julie Hanson of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for “Charmed in What Regard”;
     Jared Harel of Astoria, New York, for “Punch Card”;
     Berwyn Moore of Erie, Pennsylvania, for “What the Wind Said”;
     Brianna Noll of Chicago, Illinois, for “What Breaks through the Dark”;
     Katherine Riegel of Tampa, Florida, for “Kites Almost Too Strong to Hold”;
     Daniel Saalfeld of Washington, D.C.,  for “Sweet Tooth”;
     Phillip Sterling of Ada, Michigan, for “Some Play of Light”;
     Daneen Wardrop of Kalamazoo, Michigan, for “Stir the Lake”;
     Scott Withiam of Marblehead, Massachusetts, for “Desperate Acts & Deliveries”;  and
     Al Zolynas of Escondido, California, for “Near and Far: Selected and New Poems.”

     The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry is given annually for a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review, who are members of the faculty at the University of Tampa. Submissions are now being accepted for 2016. Entries must follow published guidelines and must be postmarked by December 31, 2015.
     Complete guidelines are available at www.ut.edu/tampareview or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606.

Studies in the Fantastic Resumes Publication

After five years in suspended animation, Studies in the Fantastic, our peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to literary fantasy, science fiction, weird tales, and magic realism, resumes publication this year under the leadership of new co-editors Daniel Dooghan and David Reamer.  They have made a call for submissions and will consider new work for the next issue of the journal through mid September.

SUBMIT BY SEPTEMBER 15

In the spirit of new beginnings, the journal invites submissions on the subject of REBOOTS. Now a staple of the entertainment industry, reboots regularly appear on television, in movie theaters, on computer screens, and, of course, in comics. Although hardly unique to the fantastic—appropriation and retelling are historically common throughout the arts—many of the most visible recent examples of the reboot are in fantastic genres such as science fiction and superheroes. This issue of Studies in the Fantastic asks why these genres are so ripe for reboot. Approaches dealing with canon formation, intermedia adaptation, and cultural capital are encouraged. 

Submissions speaking to the “REBOOT” theme are especially welcome.

REBOOTS: RETURNS, REPEATS, REINCARNATIONS, RESURRECTIONS, RECYCLINGS, RECURRENCES, REPETITIONS, RE-TREADS, REINVENTIONS, RECOVERIES, RE-DOS, RESTORATIONS, REPLACEMENTS, REPLICATIONS, RECONCEPTIONS, RECONSTITUTIONS, REMOUNTS, REIMAGININGS, REALIZATIONS

Essays on other topics will also be considered. 

Send by September 15, 2015, with publication planned for the end of the year.

Studies in the Fantastic is a journal publishing referenced essays, informed by scholarly criticism and theory, on both fantastic texts and their social function. Although grounded in literary studies, we are especially interested in articles examining genres and media that have been underrepresented in humanistic scholarship. Subjects may include, but are not limited to weird fiction, science/speculative fiction, fantasy, video games, architecture, science writing, futurism, and technocracy.

Submitted articles should conform to the following guidelines:

1. 3,000-12,000 words

2. MLA style citations and bibliography

3. A separate title page with author information to facilitate peer review

4. 1” margins, 12 point serif font, page numbers

We look forward to seeing your work!  Please submit to:

fantastic@ut.edu

Daniel Dooghan and David Reamer, editors

Founding Editor: S. T. Joshi

Editorial Board: Sean Donnelly, Richard Mathews, and Elizabeth Winston

Peter Meinke Appointed Florida Poet Laureate: Florida Poetry is in Good Shape

One of Peter Meinke’s most popular books from the University of Tampa Press is The Shape of Poetry, his “practical guide to writing and reading poems.”  Now we are delighted to know that poetry in Florida is in great shape and good hands, since Peter has been appointed as Florida’s Poet Laureate.

Peter has been poet laureate for the City of St. Petersburg since 2009. This month Florida Governor Rick Scott named him to a four-year term as official Poet Laureate for the State of Florida. He becomes only the fourth Poet Laureate in the state’s history, stepping into a position officially established by the Florida Legislature in 2014. The state’s previous laureates were Franklin N. Wood, appointed by Gov. John W. Martin in 1929; Vivian Laramore Rader, appointed by Gov. Doyle E. Carlton in 1931; and Edmund Skellings, appointed by Gov. Robert Graham in 1980.

Peter is Professor Emeritus at Eckerd College, where he directed the creative writing program for nearly 30 years.  He has published eighteen books and chapbooks, including eight volumes of poetry in the Pitt Poetry series, and he has three books in print from the University of Tampa Press: Lines from Neuchatel, The Shape of Poetry, and Truth and Affection, all of them with drawings by Jeanne Meinke, his wife. This summer the press is working on its fourth Meinke book, The Elf Poem, another collaboration with drawings by Jeanne. It is an introduction to poetry for young people (and children of all ages), containing, as its subtitle states, “Less Than 10 Not Very Golden Rules for Children Who Like to Write Poetry.”

Congratulations to Peter (and Jeanne)—and watch for The Elf this fall from UT Press!

Announcing the new Tampa Review Online

This year as Tampa Review celebrates fifty years of publication we’re naturally looking back over the last half-decade to savor milestones and accomplishments. But we’re also looking forward to the next fifty years!  We expect they will bring even more changes as new media continue to offer new forms of literary publishing. We know there will be even more changes ahead, but to along with our 50th anniversary issues, we have also launched a new look and location for Tampa Review Online.

Starting last fall, our sibling on the Web, Tampa Review Online, originally created and edited by graduate students in the low-res MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Tampa, has been more closely linked in staff and content to the print edition of Tampa Review. At the same time, we have joined the launch of Project Muse Commons, a shared space on the Web for content and comment in the context of other university presses and nonprofit publishers that make up Project MUSE. A Johns Hopkins University-based digital collection of over 550 scholarly journals, Project MUSE represents 160 university presses and academic publishers. It now makes digital editions of Tampa Review available to about 2,700 college and university libraries around the world that are Project MUSE subscribers, and with the addition of Tampa Review Online we are able to offer content that complements and extends our print edition. 

TR Online currently includes an extended conversation about new art from China and the artists whose work appears in Tampa Review 49. Barbara Pollack, a New York-based independent curator and a leading expert on contemporary Chinese art, speaks with Katherine Pill, Assistant Curator of Art after 1950 at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. Together they explore many fascinating aspects of the Chinese art scene as they consider ways in which “the aesthetics of misinterpretation” play a role in international art.  Recent Tampa Review Prize poet Michael Hettich discusses one of the poems from his prize-winning manuscript that is featured in the latest issue, and there is a video link to Michael's reading of the poem. Also online, J. Malcolm Garcia, whose “My Middle Age” from Tampa Review 45/46  was named a “notable essay” in Best American Essays and who reflects on Syrian refugees in Tampa Review 49, has sent an email update about some of his current work.

The new Tampa Review Online will be a continuous source of creative writing and art published to the same standard as work in the print edition of Tampa Review. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry, interviews and conversations, as well as all forms of visual art will complement and expand the print edition of Tampa Review.

Read the Project MUSE Commons announcement about the new site, and visit

TampaReview.musecommons.org

Paula Brancato Wins Ninth Annual Danahy Fiction Prize

   

     Paula Brancato of Long Island City, New York, has been selected as winner of the ninth annual Danahy Fiction Prize by the editors of Tampa Review. She will receive a cash award of $1,000 and her winning short story, “Executive Spa,” will be published in the forthcoming Fall/Winter issue of Tampa Review.

     Brancato is a first-generation Sicilian-American writer with a business degree from Harvard and both Wall Street and Hollywood experiences informing her writing.

     “‘Executive Spa’ is one of a series of stories from my novel-in-progress called Never Iron Naked, loosely based on my growing up in the 1970s in and around New York City,” Brancato explains. ”While the Bronx was burning, disco reigned, and entire buildings stood empty in the inner city, a new generation of women had begun to fight their way into power positions in the mainstream. We came from difficult, parochial backgrounds, where a college education was rarely more than a hope and a dream.”

     Brancato is a graduate of Hunter College and the Los Angeles Film School. She also earned an MBA from Harvard, becoming one of the first women executives on Wall Street. She is also a filmmaker, music producer, and financial advisor working with hedge funds, family offices, and The World Bank, all of which have contributed to her unique voice.

     “We learned to make our way in foreign territory bringing our cultures, beliefs and creativity with us and forever changing business, the sciences, and the arts, ”Brancato says. “If you recognize this story it is because this is what young men always do, but we really were the first generation of women who had the full liberty to do so, often against what our families and the men in our lives had to say about it. After all, the Ivy Leagues only began accepting women in the mid-’70s, weird as that may now seem.”

     Brancato’s poems and stories have appeared in Mudfish, Bomb Magazine, Georgetown Review, Litchfield Review, Southern California Anthology, Ambit Magazine, and Georgia Review. She has received the Brushfire Poet Award, first prize from the Chester H. Jones Foundation, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize honorable mention.

     She explains that her business experiences are part of her fiction, “But this is not what I was thinking when I wrote this story. What I was thinking about was the feel of ironing, the warmth, the soothing sensation of the cloth, the smells and tastes of home and home lost, because that’s what it takes if you are going to move forward into new territory. It takes leaving everything and everyone behind. So, I remembered myself, alone, 17, making my own way in a city in a culture that was simultaneously bursting with life and falling apart. In three days I would be homeless. I had sunk so low there was nothing else to lose—and then what? Then what is this story.”

* * *

This year the judges also named four outstanding finalists for the Danahy Prize:

     “Ruth’s Red Ale” by Ann Stewart McBee of St. Francis, Wisconsin;

     “Rome” by Gretchen Comba of Richmond, Virginia;

     “Reclaimed” by Mary DiRago of Chicago, Illinois;

     and “Everything Nice” by Jill Rosenberg of Montclair, New Jersey.

* * *

     The Danahy Fiction Prize was established by Paul and Georgia Danahy as an annual award for a previously unpublished work of short fiction judged by the editors of Tampa Review, the faculty-edited literary journal of the University of Tampa, published twice yearly in a distinctive hardback format. Subscriptions are $22 annually, and those received before August will begin with the issue featuring Brancato’s prize-winning story.

     The Danahy Fiction Prize is open to both new and widely published writers, with an annual postmark deadline of November 1. The $20 entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Tampa Review, and all entries submitted are considered for publication.

     Complete guidelines are available online or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Danahy Fiction Prize, University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606.

In Memoriam: Steve Kowit

     The editors and staff of Tampa Review and the University of Tampa Press mourn the loss of poet-editor-teacher Steve Kowit, 2006 winner of the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection The First Noble Truth and author of other books of poems, including Lurid Confessions, The Dumbbell Nebula, and The Gods of Rapture.  He also wrote the influential creative writing workshop text In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop.

     Steve passed away in his sleep in the early hours of April 2, 2015, at his home in Potrero, California, on Coyote Holler Road, in the San Diego area, near the Mexican border.  We were in the process of editing page proofs for his forthcoming collection, Cherish: New and Selected Poems, which will be published later this year by the University of Tampa Press. He is survived by his wife, Mary, who will complete the editing of this final collection.

     Tributes can be found on Steve’s Facebook page. He was a strong and vibrant force for poetry and a friend who will be deeply missed.

Southside Buddhist Wins Florida Book Award Honor

Southside Buddhist by Ira Sukrungruang, published in 2014 by the University of Tampa Press, has just been named winner of the Bronze Medal for General Nonfiction in the Ninth Annual Florida Book Awards recognitions.

        The Florida Book Awards were established in 2006 to recognize the best contemporary Florida literature. The annual selection is coordinated by Florida State University Libraries and has become the nation’s most comprehensive state book awards program. Eligible authors must be full-time Florida residents.

         

        This year more than 200 submissions were read and evaluated by juries of three members, each nominated from across the state by co-sponsoring organizations. Details about all of this year’s winners are available on the 2014 awards page of the Florida Book Awards website.

         

        Sukrungruang, who teaches writing at the University of South Florida in Tampa, is a Thai American writer. The autobiographical essays in Southside Buddhist include reflections on life, art, and writing. His previous books include his memoir Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy and a collection of poetry, In Thailand It Is Night, which won the Anita Claire Scharf Prize and was also published by the University of Tampa Press.

Both books are available on our website, or you can click directly to their catalog listings:

Southside Buddhist   •   In Thailand It Is Night