Stefani Nellen and Ann Stoney win 14th and 15th Danahy Fiction Prizes

Stefani Nellen

The editors of Tampa Review are thrilled to announce the winners of the 14th and 15th annual Danahy Fiction Prizes. The events of the previous year delayed the judging, resulting in our first simultaneous award. The winners are Stefani Nellen and Ann Stoney. Each will receive a cash prize of $1,000, and their winning stories will be published in the upcoming issue of Tampa Review.

Stefani Nellen, a German psychologist living in the Netherlands, is the winner of the fourteenth annual Danahy Fiction Prize with her story "Three Miles A Day." Nellen is a Clarion Workshop graduate with an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her stories appear in Guernica, AGNI, Glimmer Train, Third Coast, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere, won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Montana Prize in Fiction (judged by Alexandra Kleeman), and were included in the Masters Review Anthology Vol. 9, selected by Rick Bass. 

Ann Stoney

Ann Stoney, of New York City, is the winner of the fifteenth annual Danahy Fiction Prize with her story "I am Pretty. I am Loved." Stoney was raised in Virginia and studied theatre at NYU. Between bread-and-butter jobs, she acted in many productions throughout the city and regionally, before embarking upon a career in education. Prior to writing short stories, she wrote poetry and performed her original songs at clubs in the metropolitan area. She holds a BFA in Acting from NYU, and an MA in Literacy from Jersey City University. Her first piece was published in the Ladies Home Journal. Since then, her writing has appeared in PIF Magazine, Duende and Strands Lit Sphere, among others. She has been recognized in several contests, placing in the finals in Tampa Review’s 2019 Danahy Fiction Prize, and Cutthroat Journal’s Rick De Marinis Short Story Contest. When she is not writing, she’s busy reviewing stories for the Bellevue Literary Journal.

The Danahy Fiction Prize was established by Paul and Georgia Danahy as an annual award for a previously unpublished work of short fiction judged by the editors of Tampa Review, the faculty-edited literary journal of the University of Tampa. The Danahy Fiction Prize is open to both new and widely published writers, with an annual postmark deadline of December 31. The $20 entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Tampa Review, and all entries submitted are considered for publication.

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

Patrica Hooper Wins North Carolina Poetry Society Award

Patricia Hooper

Poet Patricia Hooper has received the 2020 Brockman-Campbell Award for her latest collection, Wild Persistence, published last year by the University of Tampa Press. The award is given by the North Carolina Poetry Society for the best book of poetry by a North Carolina writer published in 2019. 

 

Hooper has lived in Gastonia, North Carolina, since 2006. Her latest book includes imagery celebrating the natural beauty of the state and reflecting upon some of the experiences involved in relocating from her longtime home in Michigan.

 

Hooper explains that North Carolina is directly present in many of the poems. “Many take place in Gastonia, where I live, or nearby in the Blue Ridge Mountains,” she says.

 

The Brockman-Campbell Award this year was judged by Lola Haskins, author of fourteen collections of poetry, including most recently Asylum, published in the Pitt Poetry Series from the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Haskins divides her time between residences in Gainesville, Florida, and Skipton, Yorkshire, in England.

 

Patricia Hooper’s book, published in October 2019 by the University of Tampa Press, is available from Amazon or directly from the UTPress at this link.

Caitlin O’Neil Wins Danahy Fiction Prize

Massachusetts Writer Caitlin O'Neil

Caitlin O’Neil, a writer and college professor from Milton, Massachusetts, is the winner of the thirteeth annual Danahy Fiction Prize, judged by the editors of Tampa Review. She receives a cash award of $1,000 and her winning short story, “Mark,” will be published in the forthcoming Spring/Summer issue of Tampa Review.

O’Neil is a graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University and currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her short fiction has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Kenyon Review, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Calyx, Calliope, Beloit Fiction Journal, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has previously won the Ninth Letter Prize in Fiction, the Women Who Write International Short Prose Contest, and received a Massachusetts Cultural Council individual artist grant. 

O’Neil says that her winning story came directly from her life experiences as a college professor and as a human being living in America today.

“I watched multiple school shootings unfold on television with sadness and fear,” O’Neil says. “Given the gridlock around gun control, I began to think about what a world that had adjusted to guns and gun violence might look like.”

O’Neil’s story is set in a near-future in which guns become an even more pervasive part of the culture.

“What if our society imagined them as something you’d grow into, something that we accepted, happily or not, but something we could agree on because it protected our children,” O’Neil asks. “College could become a place where kids entered into an adulthood of guns and violence in a controlled way. But of course ideas we have about ‘control’ work in theory and fall apart in practice. Violence is inescapable and finds us in ways we can’t see coming. In this story, the violence of the world meets the vulnerability of motherhood, which can make any harm hurt more deeply.”

Tampa Review judges praised O’Neil’s story for bringing complexity and an original imaginative perspectives to characters struggling with violence, values, and knowledge.

“O’Neil’s story is both contemporary and timeless,” said Tampa Review editor Richard Mathews. “In multiple dramatic and metaphoric ways, it reminds us how important the details are, getting the specifics right in what we learn, and not forgetting or overlooking them. And it reminds us that it is increasingly difficult—as well as increasingly important—to be attentive to the often subtle, specific, individual details essential to teaching, to learning, and to surviving in an increasingly mass society.”

O’Neil says the story represents a somewhat different approach to fiction.

“The story contains more echoes of my actual life than most stories I write these days,” she says, “probably because the speculation here doesn’t seem as far-fetched to me.”

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This year Tampa Review judges also named four Danahy Prize Finalists:

Camille Cusumano, of San Francisco, California, for “Messages from the Womb”;

Allison Kade, of Northampton, Massachusetts, for “Doing a Mitzvah”; 

Michael Sarabia, of Guadalupe, California, for “Jean Hill’s Tia”; and

Ann Stoney, of New York, New York, for “Soldiers and Lovers.”

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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, which is published twice yearly. Subscriptions are $25 annually, and subscriptions received by the end of February will begin with the issue featuring O’Neil’s prize-winning story.

The Danahy Fiction Prize is open to both new and widely published writers, with an annual postmark deadline of December 31. The $20 entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Tampa Review, and all entries submitted are considered for publication.

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

Keith Kopka Wins Tampa Review Prize for Poetry

Poet Keith Kopka

Keith Kopka, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has won the 2019 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his first book of poems, Count Four. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2020 by the University of Tampa Press. 

Kopka’s poetry and criticism have recently appeared in Best New Poets, Mid-American Review, New Ohio Review, Berfrois, Ninth Letter, The International Journal of the Book, and many other journals. He is the author of the critical text Asking a Shadow to Dance: An Introduction to the Practice of Poetry and the recipient of the 2017 International Award for Excellence from the Books, Publishing & Libraries Research Network. 

Tampa Review judges praised his manuscript for its clarity of voice and surprising textures of metaphor that elevate his appealing, informal language: 

“Count Four starts by winning us over to a close relationship with the author. We are sharing experiences with a confiding friend, who tells us, ‘I've always wanted to climb behind the wheel of a Zamboni’ and boasts, ‘If I wanted to, I could lift this poem above my head, and hold it there like a cartoon dumbbell.’ Before we know it, we’re caught up in the real power of a poet driving a vehicle that can smooth and restore the surfaces, leaving them ready to accept fresh scars as the next virtuoso performance or power play begins. We brace ourselves to witness the approaching crashes. We cheer at each passionate shot.”

Kopka is also the co-founder and the Director of Operations for Writers Resist, an international coalition of writers resisting the erosion of diverse expression and humane values, and a Senior Editor at Narrative Magazine. He’s currently an assistant professor at Holy Family University in Philadelphia.

“Count Four is a highly personal collection of poems,” Kopka says. “It’s a book about trying to reconcile the more toxic aspects of masculine identity and understand the forces that shape that identity.” 

Despite the hockey metaphors of the opening poem, Kopka explains that much of the book draws from a somewhat similarly rough, edgy, and dangerous musical environment. 

“Many of the poems in the collection were written over years I spent in and around the East Coast punk scene,” Kopka says. “Writing this collection was my attempt to make sense of how the things and people that I loved the most in this environment were also what was most likely to destroy me. It was an attempt to reconcile the fact that the reason I loved and desired them was because of their destructive capacity.” 

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This year the judges also announced twelve finalists:

Craig Beaven, of Tallahassee, Florida, for "Teaching the Baby to Say I Love You”;

Sigman Byrd, of Westminster, Colorado, for “The Unlearning”;

Richard Cecil, of Bloomington, Indiana, for “Fantastic Voyage”;

Bill Christophersen, of New York, New York, for “Where Truth Lies”;

Andrew Collard, of Kalamazoo, Michigan, for “How to Be Held”;

Craig Cotter, of Pasadena, California, for “Alex”;

Jon Davis, of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for “The Many-Body Problem”;

Karen Kovacik, of Indianapolis, Indiana, for “Portable City”;

Nicholas Molbert, of Urbana, Illinois, for “Playing in Long Shadows”;

William Notter, of Richmond, Virginia, for “Buying the Farm”;

Martin Ott, of Los Angeles, California, for “The Stars Beneath Our Feet”; and

Mike Schneider, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for “Festive Purple Inner Glow.”

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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 2020. Entries should follow the published guidelines and must be received online by December 31, 2019.

Complete guidelines are available at TampaReview.org/submissions

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.

A Memorial Tribute to Dr. Duane Locke (1921-2019)

Julius Duane Locke, 1921-2019

Duane Locke was one of the three founding editors of the Poetry Review at the University of Tampa in 1964 (with R. Morris Newton and W. T. Cuddihy), and while others came and went, Duane continued to edit the literary journal on his own until his retirement in 1986. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1958, and he joined the faculty at the University of Tampa that same year.

Duane devoted his teaching and writing career to the University of Tampa, where he became Professor of English and poet-in-residence. His many years of professional service established commitments to poetry and to nonprofit literary and artistic innovation, outreach, and publication that have been carried forward to the direct descendant of Duane’s UT Poetry Review: today’s Tampa Review, now the oldest continuously published literary journal in the state. He inspired many of his students to devote themselves to poetry, teaching, and literary pursuits, and he left a literary legacy of dedication and passion. His letters and papers preserved in the Special and Area Studies Collections at the George A. Smathers Library at the University of Florida provide ample evidence of his vitality as editor, writer, and teacher. There is correspondence with other poetry editors and publishers (Fred Wolven, editor of the Ann Arbor Review; Harvey Tucker of Black Sun Press; Hugh Fox of Ghost Dance Press, Paul Roth of Bitter Oleander Press, and many other poets and former students, including Sylvia Krohn Scheibli, Charles Hayes, Helene Jarmol, Leo Connellan, William Taylor, Nico Suarez, Gerritt O’Sullivan, Sam Cornish, Jane Leonard, James MacQueen, Randall Ackley, and Roger Sauls, some of whom worked with him on the Poetry Review. Among the better-known poets included in his correspondence are Robert Bly, David Ignatow, Louis Hammer, Robert Morgan, and Diane Wakoski, all of whom appeared in the editions of the journals Duane published during his twenty-eight years at the university.

The editors of Tampa Review note with sadness and deep appreciation the passing of an inspiring Editor and Professor Emeritus. We want to share a tribute from one of his former students, which speaks for itself.

Tribute to Dr. Duane Locke

by Dr. José Rodeiro, one of his former students

Brilliant Florida poet Dr. Duane Locke died February 17, 2019. He was a leading light of American poetry from the 1960s to the early-21st century, standing as one of the seminal voices of his generation inspiring several generations of poets and artists involved in Linguistic Reality, Immanentism, Imagistic Poetry, Thing-Thing Metaphysics, and other contemporary poetic movements. He published many books, including: Duane Locke: “The First Decade (1968-1978),” Bitter Oleander Press. Courageously, Dr. Locke maintained full control of his brilliant mind and his energetic intensity until the very end of his remarkable creative life! In fact, Last year at the Poetry Convention in Tampa (FL), Dr. Duane Locke (at age 96) read his poems with such strength and power that he filled the room with “duende.” A year later, he passed at age 97 in full possession of his passionate, creative, and deeply perceptive “poetic-being.”

In 1921, Duane Locke was born in Plains, Georgia; consequently, as a small child, he played with his neighbor—little Jimmy Carter. His family moved to Florida, which remained his home. He lived in Tampa and on Sanibel Island. He earned his Ph.D. in literature from the University of Florida, where a hefty archive is kept about him.

A devout naturalist, Duane Locke had an overwhelming passion, fascination, and love for all living things, perceiving (innately “knowing”) concrete, specific details about every living thing. He fervently loved the Earth and every animal and plant inhabiting it, knowing their precise scientific names and specific details regarding their existence. Beyond Florida, Duane Locke loved Italy and all things Italian: opera, Campari, fine wines, Chianti, Italian cuisine, and Early-Renaissance art from Cimabue, Giotto, Duccio, all the way to Botticelli. He agreed with Picasso that Paolo Uccello was the greatest of all painters. Thus, he loathed High Renaissance art (he especially reviled Michelangelo), but passionately loved the Mannerists, particularly Domenico Beccafumi. Duane Locke believed that art reflected internal reality, valuing the Immanent (“the within”) over the Transcendental (“the without”). Thus he preferred William Blake’s poems over William Wordsworth’s poems; he preferred the visual art of William Blake over the art of Sir Joshua Reynolds. He valued French Surrealism, Spanish Surrealism, and Latin American Surrealism in poetry and art. Both nationally and internationally, he knew every aspect of modern and contemporary poetry, and was a scholar of Baroque Poetry (especially the English Metaphysical poets). He knew more and experienced more than any human being that I’ve known, always delving deeply into the tiniest hidden marrow of each particular “living” thing.

Michael Lavers Wins 2018 Tampa Review Prize

Utah Poet Michael Lavers

Michael Lavers, of Provo, Utah, has won the 2018 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his first book of poems, After Earth. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2019 by the University of Tampa Press.

Poems by Lavers have appeared in Crazyhorse, 32 Poems, The Hudson Review, Best New Poets 2015, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He has been awarded the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor's International Poetry Prize, and the Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets.

Tampa Review judges praised his manuscript for its lyricism and intelligence:

“After Earth constructs a fascinating perspective on our planet and our lives. On one hand it is tender, personal, and intimate—a father singing a lovely lullaby for his newborn infant—and on another it is breathtakingly cosmic, detached, and nearly post-apocalyptic—looking at Earth as a blip in a science fiction spacetime multiverse unfolding in terms of light years and infinite distances. The author draws from a reservoir of scientific, theological, and literary sources to build a structure for the book with something of the architectural strength and uplifting decorative beauty of a gothic cathedral.”

Lavers earned his undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University. He continued his education to complete an MFA at Johns Hopkins, and PhD at the University of Utah. Together with his wife, the writer and artist Claire Åkebrand, and their two children, he now lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches poetry at Brigham Young University.

Lavers says that the poems in this first book were written in a variety of circumstances.

”Most of the poems in After Earth were written while I was learning how to be a father,” Lavers explains, ”and so they are fueled by all the anxiety and fear, and joy and bliss, that come with that new life. They were written sometimes at home, sometimes at school or work, but also at playgrounds and parks, coming as hasty and distracted drafts while my two small kids clambered up and down slides or chased ducks. I admit to spending many hours early in the morning at McDonald's—because there was nowhere else to go—polishing what lines and stanzas I could before going home to parent, and felt somewhat reassured when I learned that for many years Harper Lee also had a regular booth at her local Golden Arches.”

“I wanted these poems to convey to my kids what really matters to me, what I would want them to know or think or feel about the world. If the book has a central tension or concern, I hope it is invoked by the title: the impulse to simply record this earth—to praise all we can, as Auden says, ‘for being and for happening’—as well as to consider what is coming next, what we might hope for, what we will miss.”

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This year the judges also announced ten finalists:

Heather Altfeld, of Chico, California, for "Selected Obituaries and Autopsies”;

William Greenway, of Ephrata, Penn., for “Everything We Bring, All We Leave Behind”;

Hunt Hawkins, of Temple Terrace, Florida, for “The Young-Old Life”;

V. P. Loggins, of Annapolis, Maryland, for “The Wild Severance”;

Sarah Fawn Montgomery, of Bridgewater, Massachusetts, for “The Intimacy of Survival”;

Emily Mohn-Slate, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for “The Falls”;

Peter Munro, of Kenmore, Washington, for “Fisheries Science in The North Pacific”;

William Notter, of Richmond, Virginia, for “Buying the Farm”;

Brian Simoneau, of West Hartford, Connecticut, for “No Small Comfort”; and

Ross White, of Durham, North Carolina, for “Guilt Ledger.”

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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 2019. Entries should follow the published guidelines and must be received online or postmarked by December 31, 2018.

Complete guidelines are available at tampareview.org/submissions 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.

Hannah Weyer Garners 12th Annual Danahy Fiction Prize

Hannah Weyer, winner of The Danahy Fiction Prize

     Hannah Weyer, a writer and filmmaker from Brooklyn, N.Y., is the winner of the twelfth annual Danahy Fiction Prize, judged by the editors of Tampa Review. She receives a cash award of $1,000, and her winning short story, “Sanctuary City,” will be published in the forthcoming Fall/Winter issue of Tampa Review.

     Weyer's debut novel, On the Come Up, received a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers award in 2013 and was an NAACP Image Award Finalist for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author.

     She has also written, directed, and produced narrative and documentary films screened at MoMA, Sundance, the New York Film Festival, and others around the world. Her films have won numerous recognitions, including awards from Sundance, Doubletake Documentary, and South by Southwest Film Festivals. Her documentaries have aired on PBS as part of the POV-American Documentary series and her screenwriting credits include work that premiered on HBO, including Life Support, starring Queen Latifah.

     “The idea for ‘Sanctuary City’ came to me after a subway commute and an overheard conversation—three boys on a train discussing a violent altercation,” Weyer says. “Around this same time, a family friend had been in a schoolyard fight, which was recorded, then posted on YouTube.”

     “As a subway rider,” Weyer explains, “I am constantly reminded to be vigilant in the face of unforeseen dangers relating to global terror, a reminder that brings with it a certain level of helplessness and fear. I began to think about the connection between helplessness caused by imagined scenarios of future violence with the helplessness and fear caused by day-to-day, street-level violence. Can helplessness be transformed into something else? If so, how?”

     Tampa Review judges praised Weyer for portraying complex and fully realized characters as they struggle not only with violence, but with their own generational and cultural gaps.

     “Weyer’s story is perceptive and timely,” said Tampa Review editor Richard Mathews. “The central character, Esme, is an honest, hard-working immigrant who finds she is under assault—her family and her values are being literally and figuratively ‘gunned down.’ It leaves a reader troubled by uncertainy and wrestling with injustice, but also deeply filled with greater empathy.”

     Weyer offers insights informed by close observation and experience. An advocate for youth, she has volunteered in New York at The Door, Scenarios USA, and Reel Works where she works with teens in the media arts. She also teaches screenwriting at Columbia University.

     “She vividly describes the New York settings, the subway scene, and the challenging situations that the young people confront—one in high school; one as a junior college dropout,” Mathews says. “She has a cinematic eye for detail and a fantastic ear for dialog.”

     This year Tampa Review judges also named five Danahy Prize Finalists:

Halvor Aakhus, of Columbia, Missouri, for “Two Women, One Gay Viking”;

Sally Lipton Derringer, of Nanuet, New York, for “Medals”;

Liana Jahan Imam, of Missoula, Montana, for “Tore a Hole in the World What Did You Expect”;

Raven Leilani of Corona, New York, for “The Void Witch”; and

Giovanna Varella of Kissimmee, Florida, for “Local Girls, 2001.”

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     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, which is published twice yearly in a distinctive hardback format. Subscriptions are $25 annually, and subscriptions received by the end of August will begin with the issue featuring Weyer’s prize-winning story.

     The Danahy Fiction Prize is open to both new and widely published writers, with an annual postmark deadline of December 31. The $20 entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Tampa Review, and all entries submitted are considered for publication.

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

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Subscribe now to read Hannah’s prize-winning story in Tampa Review

Enjoy the first decade of Danahy Fiction Prize stories in

The Danahy Fiction Prize: Ten Years, Ten Stories 

In Memoriam: Michelle Boisseau

Michelle Boisseau. Photo courtesy UMKC.

The editors and staff of the University of Tampa Press and Tampa Review share a deep sense of loss at the passing of poet, editor, and teacher Michelle Boisseau. She died Wednesday, November 15, 2017, in Kansas City of lung cancer.

Click this sentence for a link to the notice posted by Kansas City’s public radio station KCUR.

Michelle won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for her last book, Among the Gorgons. When Michelle visited our campus last year to read selections from the book, I had the pleasure of introducing her.  In tribute to her, I would like to post that introduction here:

As many readers will know, the gorgons in Greek mythology are three sisters with serpents for hair. Their penetrating eyes are powerfully compelling, capable of destroying or turning to stone those who look upon them.  As ancient goddesses with origins going all the way back beyond six thousand years B.C., their irresistible monstrous beauty holds the power to both destroy and resurrect.  Their gorgon faces serve as both mask and mirror.

Through the words of Michelle Boisseau, “among the gorgons,” one gradually senses what it might be like inside those eyes, on the other side of the mirror and the mask. What unrelenting courage does it take to see with such eyes?  What dreadful humor, terrifying sympathy, or fierce and penetrating love is awake behind the gaze?

Each year I read hundreds of unpublished poetry book manuscripts for the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and I find myself looking for one manuscript that I cannot resist.  I set this as a challenge for myself.  If I can put it down, turn away, and stop looking at it, then I do, and move on to consider the next one. But my gaze kept returning to Among the Gorgons.

It was a manuscript with such impressive range, variety, and craftsmanship that I could not turn away. It leapt unexpectedly from personal to mythic, tender to satiric, or tragic to comic. It was beautifully crafted and artistically compelling. It simply had to be our winner.

Eventually I would discover the poet who submitted it: Michelle Boisseau.  When it comes to poetry, she literally wrote the book.  Her creative writing textbook, Writing Poems, is required reading in workshops around the country and is now in its eighth edition.

She is the author of four previous books of poetry: A Sunday in God-Years, published in 2009 by the University of Arkansas Press; Tumbling Air, a PEN USA finalist, published by University of Arkansas Press, 2003; Understory, winner of the Morse Prize, Northeastern University Press, 1996; and No Private Life, Vanderbilt, 1990. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, and Shenandoah, in addition to many other influential journals.

She was educated at Ohio University and the University of Houston (Ph.D., English/Creative Writing). She has taught at Virginia Intermont College, Morehead State University, and since 1995 at the University of Missouri Kansas City. She has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and two prizes from The Poetry Society of America.  She serves as associate editor of BkMk Press and is a member of The Poetry Society of America and PEN America.

In writing judges’ comments for the unpublished text of Among the Gorgons, I tried to express some of the things that made the manuscript so compelling. They remain among the many reasons I am glad this manuscript existed, for I feel very grateful that it has given me the opportunity to get to know Michelle, and to come to know her book more fully during the process of publishing it. I also feel fortunate to be able to introduce her to you here, and in doing so, I would like to share the conclusion of my comments:

In a world where we are all aware of sudden reversals, Boisseau suggests the relevance of art. We are tasked with admiration for the artistic gift that frames contradiction and reveals its beauty. Her voice constantly surprises us with strength in unexpected places and shapes irony into an energetic force. Best of all, her poems in this collection work individually—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.  As Boisseau writes of Henry James’s  meeting with George Eliot: “Ugly is the mother of the sublime—dreadful / and magnetic, it sucks you over the edges / with the torque of awe, so much like love / it must be love.” Boisseau renders and controls the torque through a collection that inspires both awe and love.

It was a deep pleasure to know and to publish editor, professor, poet, and half-sister to Gorgons, Michelle Boisseau.

-Richard Mathews, Director, University of Tampa Press

Poet Eric Smith Wins 2017 Tampa Review Prize

Poet Eric Smith

Eric Smith, of Carrboro, North Carolina, has won the sixteenth annual Tampa Review Prize for Poetry for his collection of poems, Black Hole Factory. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2018 by the University of Tampa Press. 

 Smith’s poems have been published in 32 Poems, Southwest Review, The New Criterion, and the Best New Poets anthology. His critical prose appears in Pleiades and The Rumpus, and is forthcoming in the AWP Writers' Chronicle. He was a founding editor of cellpoems, the innovative and award-winning poetry journal distributed via text message, and he has received scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Convivio, among others.  He is an assistant professor of English at Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia, and divides his time between West Virginia and a home in North Carolina. 

Tampa Review judges praised his manuscript for its exploration of an impressive range of traditional poetic forms while building an innovative, personal voice:  

“Eric Smith writes with a commitment to the history and craftsmanship of the well-shaped poem, but his use of tradition, rhyme, and meter become sources of surprise and innovation in his hands. The book has poems that communicate impressive control, intellect, and wit—poems that cultivate ironic self-awareness and detachment on the part of both poet and reader.  And then there are breakthrough moments giving up both irony and control.  In the end, he has shaped a profound and accomplished manuscript of deep personal engagement graced by moving, open flights of lyricism.”

Smith was born in Carrollton, Georgia, and lived in Michigan, Florida, and Spain before moving to West Virginia in 2010.  He earned his BA at the University of West Georgia, an MA from Northern Michigan University, and an MFA from the University of Florida. 

Smith says that his interests in form are wide-ranging.

“I do think rhyme and meter are important. But that’s not to say these tools are more important than any others,” Smith says. “These just happen to be ones that work for me. I’m perpetually astonished by my contemporaries who dare the limits of form, who put new pressure on language and on the sentence.”

“It’s not a stretch to connect that interest in form and restraint to cellpoems, ” he adds. ”My friend Christopher Shannon, an incredible poet and the founding editor of cellpoems, introduced me to the work of Lorine Niedecker, who says in “Poet’s Work”: “No layoff / from this / condensery.” We took that, I think, as an imperative—both for the kind of work we published in the magazine, and also in the work we were ourselves attempting to do.”

Smith is currently working on a second collection of poems, as well as a collection of critical essays on contemporary poetry. 

This year the judges also announced ten finalists: 

Aaron Baker, of Chicago, Illinois, for "Posthumous Noon”;

Charlie Bondhus of Bridgewater, New Jersey,  for “Divining Bones”;

Polly Buckingham of Medical Lake, Washington, for “A Day Like This”;

Donna L. Emerson of Petaluma, California, for “The Place of Our Meeting”;

Jonathan Greenhause of Jersey City, New Jersey, for “Our Recurring List of Heartbreaks”; 

Emily Mohn-Slate of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for “The Falls”; 

Jim Peterson of Lynchburg, Virginia, for “The Horse Who Bears Me Away”; 

Nicholas Samaras of West Nyack, New York, for “The World as Smoke and Distance”; 

Maureen Seaton of Miami, Florida, for “Undersea”; and

Randall Watson of Houston, Texas, for “The Geometry of Wishes.”

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 2018. Entries should follow the published guidelines and must be received online or postmarked by December 31, 2017.

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.

Garrett Theige Garners Eleventh Annual Danahy Fiction Prize from Tampa Review

Garrett Theige, winner of the 2017 Danahy Fiction Prize 

Garrett Theige, of Andover, Massachusetts, has been selected as the winner of the eleventh annual Danahy Fiction Prize by the editors of Tampa Review. He receives a cash award of $1,000 and his winning short story, “Blast Radius,” will be published in the forthcoming Fall/Winter issue of Tampa Review.

This will be a first fiction publication for Theige, who has substantial work in print as a journalist and teaches English at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. 

Theige grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and graduated from the University of Missouri with degrees in magazine journalism and English. His previous writing experience includes work as a sports reporter and freelance magazine writer in Missouri, two summers as a newspaper reporter in Michigan, and work as a reporter in Grand Forks, North Dakota, before moving to Andover to teach.

 “Blast Radius,” while set within the confines of a central character’s apartment, has its origins from a global perspective. The story gradually reveals the frightening awareness of an approaching worldwide destruction.

“I wrote a much shorter version of ‘Blast Radius’ in 2013 while studying in Pamplona, Spain,” Theige says. “My roommate and most of my friends were vacationing in other countries, which left me with an unusually quiet apartment and an entire week to myself. Pamplona itself also felt pretty hushed that week, as if the blankets of clouds were muffling the normal sounds of the city. I'm somewhat of a classic extrovert, so I usually cope with silence by doing a lot of writing. That first version of the story reflected a lot of that week—Jerry [the central character] wandered around his apartment while wondering about the outside world in the face of a looming apocalypse.”

“I put the story away for three years until I returned to it this past fall to expand it,“ Theige said. 

Tampa Review judges praised Theige for his use of vivid and original detail, controlled pacing of his plot, and a clear and evocative prose style. 

“Garrett's story was unusual in the best ways,” said one of the judges, fiction editor Yuly Restrepo. “Its dystopian, apocalyptic setting is immediately engaging, but what makes it a winner is the humanity at its core.” 

This year judges also named two runners-up for the Danahy Prize: Alicia Fuhrman of Northampton, Massachusetts, for “Salvage,” and Ron MacLean of Roslindale, Massachusetts, for “Lesser Escape Artists.” 

“It was a real surprise to discover the coincidence that these top three writers are all living in Massachusetts,” said Richard Mathews, editor of Tampa Review. “That’s never happened before. But when we contacted Garrett Theige to tell him he’d won, we found out he’d moved out of Fargo, North Dakota, where he lived when he submitted his story, and he now lives in Massachusetts. It’s definitely a literary state!”

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 $25 annually, and subscriptions received by the end of August will begin with the issue featuring Theige’s prize-winning story.

The Danahy Fiction Prize is open to both new and widely published writers, with an annual postmark deadline of December 31. The $20 entry fee includes a one-year subscription to Tampa Review, and all entries submitted are considered for publication.

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

Richard Chess Discusses His Newest Book of Poetry

Poet Richard Chess is the Director of The Center for Jewish Studies, Roy Carroll Professor of Honors Arts and Sciences, and Chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Asheville. He is also the author of three previous collections of poetry, Tekiah (1994), Chair in the Desert (2000), and Third Temple (2007), all of them available from the University of Tampa Press. 

As the official publication date approaches, Rick sat down with Tampa Press Director Richard Mathews to talk about the new book, what he’s been up to, and what 2017 will bring. This is an excerpt of their discussion, but you can read the complete conversation with Richard Chess on Tampa Review Online.

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Mathews: The variety and focus of work in your new collection of poetry, Love Nailed to the Doorpost, is surprising and impressive, even to those of us who have known your work well over the years.  Can you talk a little about how it came to be?

Chess: Since publishing Third Temple, I’ve become a regular contributor to “Good Letters,” the blog published by the folks at Image journal. I contribute a thousand-word piece (or a little less) to “Good Letters” about every eighteen days or so. I’ve been writing for them for six years now.

Writing for “Good Letters” has enabled me to discover a new voice and style of writing. It has been one of the most exciting developments for me as a writer at this stage of my life. A good number of the pieces are lyrical prose, more like longish prose poems. Some (but very few) are straightforward narrative, analytical, or argumentative pieces of prose. I’ve also written some about my experiences as an educator, looking in particular at ways I’ve been integrating contemplative practices into my teaching.

I am also very active in two other networks that have some bearing on the directions in which my writing and teaching have moved in recent years. First, I’m involved in a national movement exploring the use of contemplative practices in higher education. The organization is called “The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.” It is the umbrella organization for the “Association for the Contemplative Mind in Higher Education.” I have been on the faculty of ACMHE’s summer seminar in contemplative curriculum development, and I have presented regularly at their annual academic conference. This organization has really become my professional home.

My work with this organization grows out of my own commitment to a personal contemplative practice discipline. I began my daily meditation and related contemplative practices in a Jewish context, participating in two cohorts of the sixteen-month-long Jewish Mindfulness Teacher Training Program, a national program. My engagement with contemplative life—in Jewish contexts and academic contexts—has been a transformative experience for me over the last eight years or so—since the publication of Third Temple.

I am a leader on my own campus of an initiative to integrate contemplative practice throughout university life. I’ve also been developing courses that I teach, mostly in the honors program, on topics connected to contemplative practices, including spiritual autobiography and poetry as a spiritual practice. 

I have no doubt that my writing has been deeply informed by these new developments in my personal and professional life.

Mathews: So we see all of these strands brought together in Love Nailed to the Doorpost?

Chess: Yes, directly and indirectly. These strands, I think, inform the way I move and think through a number of the poems and pieces of lyrical prose. These experiences have also opened my eyes to certain subjects that I don’t think I would have explored if it had not been for the practices in which I’ve been engaged as an educator, a Jew, and a writer.

Read the complete conversation with

Richard Chess in Tampa Review Online.

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Love Nailed to the Doorpost is available now for order in hardback or paperback.

In Memoriam: R. C. H. Briggs

Author and Barrister R. C. H. Briggs

The editors and staff of the University of Tampa Press share a deep sense of loss at the passing of a friend and mentor, the British writer, barrister, and editor R. C. H Briggs.  He died peacefully on December 28, 2016, in his bed at home in Coombe Bissett, near Salisbury, with his family around him. He was 92.

Ronald Charles Hawkswell Briggs was born in West Yorkshire, and graduated from New College, Oxford. After serving in the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC) from 1943 until 1947, earning the rank of Captain, he completed a Master of Jurisprudence degree and an advanced degree in French.  He became a barrister at law, and following a period of practice at the Common Law Bar, in 1972 he accepted  appointment as Legal Secretary for the independent legal watchdog organization Justice, the UK section of the International Commission of Jurists. There he advanced the group’s mission of “promoting human rights” and “improving the system of justice.”

During his years at Oxford University, and even as he began his legal work, Ron was also becoming a leading authority on the work of William Morris. He was drawn to Morris for a host of reasons, from printing to politics.  In 1957, Ron proposed and successfully launched the first important traveling exhibition of Morris’s work as a printer and typographer: The Typographic Adventure of William Morris. He completed a groundbreaking "Handlist of the Public Addresses of William Morris” in 1960, which called attention to Morris’s speeches as a central and neglected part of his achievements. He launched the first issue of the Journal of the William Morris Society in 1961, serving as its founding editor, and continuing to edit and publish it for seventeen years and making it the single most important source for William Morris studies. In his "Editorial" for the first issue, Ron wrote: “Morris’ central theme, epitomized by him as ‘Reverence for the life of Man upon the Earth,’ led him to criticize much in the world around him; and much that Morris criticized still exists.”

As a leading light for the William Morris Society, he served as its Honorary Secretary as well as a trustee of the Kelmscott House Trust.  He designed numerous publications and led the Society’s publishing program, including introducing a custom of hand printing an annual Christmas greetings card, often in the Kelmscott House basement, which housed a treadle-operated Arab press and one of the original Albion presses from the Kelmscott Press. He organized excursions to important Morris sites, launched the William Morris Centre at Kelmscott House, and was instrumental in the historic home’s preservation and improvement. Today it continues to be home to the William Morris Society.

Ron was deeply committed to issues of human rights and human dignity, equitable justice, political integrity and reform, historical preservation, international thinking, and the preservation of the environment.  He worked to sustain and contribute to many of the works and perceptions that Morris advocated.  His friend and colleague Martin Williams, who served with him as an officer of the Morris Society and later became a founding trustee of the Emery Walker Trust, aptly observed: “Ron was a remarkable character—inspirational, idiosyncratic, and truly larger than life. There was something of William Morris about him, with that continuous energy and unrelenting pursuit of what he perceived to be the right.”

As a dedicated amateur printer, Ron was also drawn to the achievements and influence of Morris’s friend and Hammersmith neighbor, Emery Walker.  He campaigned in many ways for greater recognition of Walker's achievements, promoting him as not only an inspiration and virtual partner in Morris’s Kelmscott Press, but for his many impressive achievements as a photographer, photographic engraver, printer, and founding partner of the influential Doves Press. Ron championed efforts that led the London County Council to place a blue plaque at Walker’s residence at 7 Hammersmith Terrace in 1959.  For that occasion, he produced the earliest draft of another influential work, which was later revised and published by the University of Tampa Press—Sir Emery Walker: A Memoir. 

Ron is survived by his wife, Joan; his children, Julian, Roland, and Jeni; and his grandchildren, Sylvie and Sasha.

A memorial service was held in Salisbury on January 12. In lieu of flowers, the family suggested donations to one of Ron’s favorite charities, the Tibet Relief Fund.

Ronald Briggs at his home a few months before his 90th birthday.