Nancy Chen Long Wins 2016 Tampa Review Prize

  

Nancy Chen Long, winner of the
Tampa Review Prize for Poetry

Nancy Chen Long of Morgantown, Indiana, has been named winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Long receives the fifteenth annual prize for her manuscript, Light into Bodies. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2017 by the University of Tampa Press. 

       Long is the author of a poetry chapbook, Clouds as Inkblots for the War Prone (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013), and has recent and forthcoming work in Alaska Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, Superstition Review, DIAGRAM, the Anthology of Contemporary Indiana Writers, and elsewhere. She earned her BS in Electrical Engineering Technology and an MBA from Indiana University—Purdue University Fort Wayne, worked as an electrical engineer, software consultant, and project manager, and more recently completed an MFA in creative writing at Spalding University. 

       Tampa Review judges praised her “bold, intelligent, beautifully shaped manuscript” and commented that the poems in Light into Bodies clearly benefit from the poet’s strong scientific background. “Starting with the opening epigraph from Sir Isaac Newton’s Opticks and developing through vocabulary and metaphors informed by mathematics and engineering as well as by myth and literature, Nancy Chen Long has composed a shining suite of poems in which cultural and scientific history merge with and illuminate personal experience,” the judges wrote.

       Born in Taiwan, Long grew up in various parts of the U.S. as the daughter of a military man. She calls south-central Indiana home and works at Indiana University in the Research Technologies division. 

       “I’ve loved poetry and writing since I was a kid,” Long says. “And because I was also a bookworm, I handcrafted books of my poems and stories—illustrated them, carefully folded the pages and stapled them together for the binding, gave them ‘library numbers’ like I’d seen on real books. 

       “When considering college, creative writing was my first career choice. I was strongly counseled, though, that ‘female writers are a dime a dozen’ and that I should go into something like science instead. So I stopped writing creatively and eventually ended up in engineering and technology. I did continue to journal and scribble down small poems, but didn’t seriously write poetry again until years later when an acquaintance suggested that I attend a women’s writing circle. That experience inspired me to once again take up the pen. I started writing and writing. Things fell into place so that I could pursue an MFA part-time while still working full-time. As a sort of joke, I’d say I felt like I was living Pablo Neruda’s line ‘And it was at that age . . . Poetry arrived / in search of me.’ The poems kept arriving until a manuscript took shape.” 

       Long sent the manuscript out for three years before it was selected for the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, and it had been a finalist fifteen times during that period. 

       “Through interviews with other poets and attending AWP panels on publication, I’d heard of poets whose manuscripts came in as finalists for ten years before being published,” Long says. “When I got the call that Light into Bodies had won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry, I could almost not believe it. The whole experience has been one wild ride, beautifully unexpected. It’s the realization of a dream that I thought had been lost to me.”

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The judges also announced ten finalists this year: 

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

Mary Gilliland of Ithaca, New York, for “The Devil’s Fools”;

Roger Greenwald of Toronto, Canada, for “The Half-Life”; 

Shaun Griffin of Virginia City, Nevada, for “The Monastery of Stars”;
Julie Hanson of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for “Dialectic and Infusion”; 

Kate Partridge of Anchorage, Alaska, for “Ends of the Earth”; 

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

Doug Ramspeck of Lima, Ohio, for “Naming the Field”; 

Nicholas Samaras of West Nyack, NY, for “The Kidnapped Child”; and

Jay Udall of Vienna, Virginia, for “Because a Fire in My Head.”

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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 2017. Entries should follow the published guidelines and must be postmarked by December 31, 2016.

       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.

Anne Ray Wins Tenth Annual Danahy Fiction Prize

Anne Ray of Brooklyn, New York, has been selected as winner of the tenth annual Danahy Fiction Prize by the editors of Tampa Review. She will receive a cash award of $1,000 and her winning short story, “Please Repeat My Name,” will be published in a forthcoming issue of Tampa Review.

       Ray grew up in suburban Maryland, graduated from the Creative Writing program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and completed an MFA in fiction at Brooklyn College. She has worked as a waitress, a gardener, an English teacher, and a fish monger. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Gettysburg Review, Opium, LIT, Conduit, Gulf Coast, and Cut Ban. She was the winner of the 2014 StoryQuarterly fiction prize. 

       She is also the author of the libretto for “Symposium,” a ten-minute opera written in collaboration with composer Oliver Caplan, which was performed by the Juventas New Music Ensemble in 2011 as part of a series on new opera. She was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and works on the 18th floor of an office building in lower Manhattan.

       Ray’s Danahy Fiction Prize story takes place in a situation familiar to many who have been called for jury duty, with the central character, Audrey, moving through various stages of the jury selection process. 

       Ray explains that the story was partially inspired by her own experience with jury duty. “One dreary and wet winter, I was selected to be on a jury for an armed robbery trial,” Ray says. ”I was juror number eight. Once I had lived through jury duty I felt that I had arrived at a setting for a story.” 

       Audrey is a character who appears in several of Ray’s stories. The author describes her as “a person overtaken by loneliness, and yet with an almost inexplicably persistent wish for beauty and hope . . . secretly giggling at her own private happiness.”

       The Tampa Review editors who judged this year’s contest were especially impressed by the ways that Ray allowed the courtroom setting to introduce large and universal questions of values and judgment, while maintaining the close psychological focus on Audrey.

       “It was strange to me, while I was sitting on the jury, how such a common—and specifically American—experience was so isolating,” Ray says. “The world of my desk job disintegrated; I was there and nowhere else. Putting Audrey in such a setting, with its absurdity and flatness, brought me pain; giving her a moment of tenderness in that same place brought me joy.”

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       This year the judges also named seven finalists for the Danahy Prize: “Central City" by Leslee Becker of Fort Collins, Colorado; “Garden for Loss” by Jan Bowman of Columbia, Maryland; “Rhino Girl” by Taylor Brown of Wilmington, North Carolina; “Emissary” by Abby Lipscomb of Fincastle, Virginia; “Phosphorous and Other Toxins” by Claire Luchette of Eugene, Oregon; “Accidental Camouflage” by Anthony J. Viola of Huntington, West Virginia; and “White Is for Compliant,” Megan Wildhood of Seattle, Washington.

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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, published twice yearly in a distinctive hardback format. Subscriptions are $22 annually, and those received before September will include the issue featuring Ray’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 http://tampareview.ut.edu or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Danahy Fiction Prize, University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606.

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