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.”

* * *

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.”

* * *

       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.

* * *

       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

Celebrating 50 years of Tampa Review: Tampa Review 49

Announcing the release of Tampa Review 49

TR49 is the first of two issues this year that will

celebrate a milestone—50 years of literary publishing.

         We are pleased to begin our fiftieth year by featuring selections from a unique and wholly new exhibition entitled, My Generation: Young Chinese Artists. The exhibition showcases a new generation of world-class Chinese artists who have emerged in China since 2000—all born after Mao’s death in 1976, marking the end of China’s Cultural Revolution. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, and the Tampa Museum of Art, and offers stunning visual evidence that Florida is fully engaged in global cultural dialog. The show runs here June 7-September 28, 2014, before traveling to Oklahoma City Museum of Art, where it will be on view October 25, 2014-January 18, 2015. The works speak for themselves while bridging the country and spanning the globe.

         The literary contents of TR49 reflect a new generation’s struggle with “Utopia”—as Qui Xiaofei visually depicts on the cover. Poet Zeina Hashem Beck also expresses it in her opening poem as she personifies a world “trying to tip over its pain.” Daniel Gabriel describes a utopian interlude in his 2009 visit to “Syria Before It All Went South.” By contrast, Malcolm Garcia struggles to find grounds for faith amidst horror and ruin in “Praying in Reyhanli.”


         Less destructive but deeply troubling is the singing war started by Mrs. Mudd in Jill Birdsall’s “The Beer Garden,” where experiences that promise harmony become discordant when inflected by greed, ego, and nationalism. Poet Michael Hettich takes a higher view in “Certain Constellations,” in which attentiveness to the natural world affirms the possibility of harmony if “we might move into/the circle of its song.”


         The issue concludes with struggles from our more recent past portrayed in Vincent Czyz’s “Straightsville,” set in the 1980s, mostly at a gay rally in Manhattan. The story’s narrator experiences a series of mutual misreadings that blur the cultural divide between New York and New Jersey, gay and straight, work week and weekend. Czyz’s story suggests, as does the speaker of Knute Skinner ’s poem “What I Have Assembled,” that selves are multiple, that they can be torn apart and reassembled in diverse ways, and that people and generations may be more alike than different.


         Finally, this first issue of our 50th anniversary year includes a few pages reproduced from the very first issue of Tampa Poetry Review in 1964.  They remind us how both our distant and recent pasts contain the cultural heritage and visionary struggles that create each new version of “my generation.” 

We have come a long way from our earliest mimeograph edition to our present hardcover format, and both of our issues this academic year will include a little taste of the journey through the past, while continuing to showcase some of the best contemporary writing and visual art from Florida and the world.

Tampa Review 49 includes:

Fiction: Jill Birdsall, Michael Cuglietta, Vincent Czyz, Dana Fitz Gale

Poetry: Zeina Hashem Beck, Robert Bense, Joshua Butts, Bill Christophersen, Mary Gilliland, Michael Hettich, Teresa Leo, Carol Levin, Lisa Lewis, Austin MacRae, Jenna Rindo, Roger Sauls, Knute Skinner, Kelly Talbot, Ralph Tejeda Wilson

Nonfiction: Daniel Gabriel, J. Malcolm Garcia, Aileen Kilgore Henderson, Laura L. Runge

Art: Birdhead, Cui Jie, Sima Diab, Liu Di, Qiu Xiaofei, Shi Zhiying, Song Kun

Order Tampa Review 49

Poet Bruce Bond Wins 2014 Tampa Review Prize

Bruce Bond, of Denton, Texas, has been named winner of the 2014 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Bond receives the thirteenth annual prize for his new manuscript, Black Anthem. In addition to a $2,000 check, the award includes hardback and paperback book publication in 2015 by the University of Tampa Press. 

Bond is the author of nine published books of poetry, most recently Choir of the Wells: A Tetralogy (Etruscan, 2013), The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan, 2009), and Blind Rain (LSU, 2008).  In addition he has four books forthcoming: The Other Sky (poems in collaboration with the painter Aron Wiesenfeld, intro by Stephen Dunn; Etruscan Press), For the Lost Cathedral (LSU Press), Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (University of Michigan), and Metaphysics of the Literal Heart (Four Way Books). 

Tampa Review judges commented that the poems in Black Anthem  left them “amazed and in awe of his poetic range and dexterity that revitalizes the sonnet form.”

“This is a manuscript that surprised us at every turn,” the judges said. “Bond plays the sonnet form like a master musician, making an old form continously new and fresh on page after page.”

“His eye and ear for language are remarkable‚” the judges added. ”Just as you think you've understood how rhymes, rhythms, themes, and sequences are working, Bond throws in another improvisation or flourish that deepens the poetic experience. You know to expect the volta, but have no idea where the turn will take you. His lyricism makes you want to go along for the ride.”

Bond’s background includes significant accomplishments as a classical and jazz guitarist, which may in part account for the musicality of language in this collection. In addition to his Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver, he also holds a Masters in Musical Performance from the Lamont School of Music and has worked as a professional guitarist.

Bond has previously received numerous recognitions for his poems, including the Allen Tate Award, the TIL Best Book of Poetry Prize, the Colladay Award, the Richard Peterson Prize, the Knightsville Poetry Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the Texas Institute for the Arts.  Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.

 A sampling of poems from Black Anthem will appear as a “sneak preview” in a forthcoming issue of Tampa Review, the award-winning hardback literary journal published by the University of Tampa Press. Bond’s book will be released in the fall of 2015.

The judges also announced ten finalists this year: 

Brian Brodeur of Cincinnati, Ohio,  for “Persons of Interest”;

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

Mark Cox of Wilmington, North Carolina, for “No Picnic in the Afterlife”; 

Tom Hansen of Custer, South Dakota, for “Body of Water, Body of Fire”; 

Judy Jordan of Anna, Illinois, for “Children of Salt”; 

Tim Mayo of Brattleboro, Vermont, for “The Body’s Pain”;

Robert McNally of Concord, California, for “Simply to Know Its Name”; 

Joel Peckham of Huntington, West Virginia, for “Body Memory”;

Brittney Scott of Richmond, Virginia, for “The Derelict Daughter”; and

Carol Westberg of Hanover, New Hampshire, for “Terra Infirma.”

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 2015. Entries must follow published guidelines and must be postmarked by December 31, 2014.

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.