WI People & Ideas Contest Winners and HMs Announced
The Council for Wisconsin Writers joins the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences Arts & Letters in congratulating Wisconsin People & Ideas contest winners and honorable mentions, including CWW board member Sylvia Cavanaugh and recent Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award honorable mention recipient Georgia Ressmeyer,
Sylvia’s “Old Dish” received an honorable mention in the poetry category. Georgia’s poem “Time Speeding Up” took third place in that category.
All winners and honorable mention recipients are listed here.
More about CWW is at wiswriters.org, the board wiswriters.org/about and how to become a member wiswriters.org/join-give.
Wisconsin Writers Awards Announced
Press Release: 2016 Wisconsin Writers Awards Announced!
From: Council for Wisconsin Writers www.wiswriters.org
For release: March 27, 2017
Contact: Jerrianne Hayslett jfarhsi@aol.com
2016 WISCONSIN WRITERS AWARDS ANNOUNCED BY COUNCIL FOR WISCONSIN WRITERS
Eight Wisconsin writers have been named winners of the Wisconsin Writers Awards for work published in 2016. The Council will award each winner $500 and a week-long writing residency at Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point. Honorable mentions will receive $50 and a residency at Painted Forest, Valton, WI. Awards will be presented at the Council’s annual banquet to be held this year on May 13 in Milwaukee.
The Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award goes to Patricia Skalka, Sturgeon Bay, for Death in Cold Water, University of Wisconsin Press. Honorable mention is awarded to Betsy Draine and Michael Hinden for Death on a Starry Night, University of Wisconsin Press.
Paula Dáil, Spring Green, is the winner of the Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award for Mother Nature’s Daughters: 21st Century Women Farmers, McFarland, while James Campbell, Lodi, receives an honorable mention award for Braving It: A Father, A Daughter, and an Unforgettable Journey Into the Alaskan Wild, Crown, Penguin Random House.
Catherine Jagoe, Madison, is the winner of the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award for the book Bloodroot, Settlement House Books. Honorable mention goes to Jon Loomis, Eau Claire, for The Mansion of Happiness, Oberlin College Press.
Rachel Davidson Leigh, Madison, is winner of the Tofte/Wright Children’s Literature Award for Hold, Interlude Press/Duet Books. Dean Robbins, Madison, receives honorable mention for Two Friends, Orchard Books/Scholastic.
Liz Wyckoff, Madison, is the winner of the Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction for “Like This, Like That,” Copper Nickel. Jeff Esterholm, Superior, is the recipient of an honorable mention for “Flaming Chevy Lodestar,” RE:AL Regarding Arts & Letters.
Carolyn Kott Washburne, Whitefish Bay, is the winner of the Kay W. Levin Short Nonfiction Award for “A Natural Ken,” Milwaukee Magazine. Patti See, Chippewa Falls, receives honorable mention for “Diary of a Bone Marrow Donor” 1966: A Journal of Creative Nonfiction.
The Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award for five individual poems goes to David Southward, Milwaukee. Honorable mention goes to Georgia Ressmeyer, Sheboygan.
Contest winners and honorable mentions were selected by out-of-state judges.
The Council for Wisconsin Writers’ Major Achievement award honors a Wisconsin writer for work that deserves special recognition for literary merit without regard to genre or category. The winner is chosen by the CWW Board of Directors. This year’s Major Achievement award will be presented to John Gurda, Milwaukee.
The public is invited to celebrate our state’s fine writers at the CWW’s Awards Banquet at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 13, at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee. Banquet tickets must be reserved by Tuesday, May 9.
More information about the winners, judges, banquet registration, and the Council for Wisconsin Writers can be found at its website, www.wiswriters.org.
WI Poet Laureate Graces Magazine Cover
Council for Wisconsin Writers Board Member and recently named Wisconsin Poet Laureate Karla Huston graces the cover of the current issue (Winter 2017) of Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine.
Inside is an excellent — and informative — feature story about her, which includes a couple of her poems. CWW hopes all writers and supporters of Wisconsin’s literary community will read the article and take advantage of this great opportunity to get to know this fine poet and wonderful person.
See Karla Huston’s bio at http://wiswriters.org/about/board-of-directors/.
Former CWW Board Member’s Book Wins Recognition
Former Council for Wisconsin Writers board member, Jennifer Morales, reports that her book, Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories, has received recognition in two venues. First, it has been chosen as the inaugural title to represent Wisconsin in the Center for the Book Great Lakes Reads program. Below is the announcement. Meet Me Halfway also is receiving a Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement award.
Wisconsin
Meet Me Halfway: Milwaukee Stories by Jennifer Morales
When Johnquell, an African American teen, suffers a serious accident in the home of his white neighbor, Mrs. Czernicki, his community must find ways to bridge divisions between black and white, gay and straight, old and young. Set in one of the nation’s most highly segregated cities—Milwaukee, Wisconsin—Meet Me Halfway tells stories of connections in a community with a tumultuous and divided past. In nine stories told from diverse perspectives, Morales captures a Rust Belt city’s struggle to establish a common ground and a collective vision of the future. She gives life to multifaceted characters—white schoolteachers and senior citizens, Latino landlords, black and Puerto Rican teens, political activists, and Vietnam vets. As an activist mother in the thick of Milwaukee politics, Morales developed a keen ear and a tender heart for the kids who have inherited the city’s troubled racial legacy. With a critical eye on promises unfulfilled, Meet Me Halfway raises questions about the notion of a “postracial” society and, with humor and compassion, lifts up the day-to-day work needed to get there.
CWW salutes and congratulates Morales for these two excellent acclamations for her book.
Poetry Collective Co-Founder Won Niedecker Award
John Walser, associate professor of English at Fond du Lac’s Marian University and co-founder of Foot of the Lake Poetry Collective, was honored at CWW’s May Awards Banquet as winner of the 2015 Lorine Niedecker Poetry Award.
Walser’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in a number of journals, including Barrow Street, Nimrod, the Evansville Review, Clackamas Literary Review, Naugatuck River Review, Fourth River, the Hiram Poetry Review, Bird’s Thumb, Lunch Ticket and Quiddity.
The Niedecker judge said of the five poems that comprised his entry, “John Walser’s poems are the pure music of an anxiety his speaker manages to translate into a kind of joy: “Thirty-six degrees/is a crocus bulb shoot/breaking the top soil/of our hibernation.” Walser believes in the power of image as representation of consciousness, and his poems speak to the power of nature when it is understood in its unity with humankind.”
Following are the remarks he made when he received the Niedecker Award at the May 14 banquet:
“Thank you to the Council for Wisconsin Writers.
Knowing the poets who have won this award in the past, all I can say is that it is a great honor to be receiving it now. Receiving it when Susan Elbe and Ron Wallace, two of my favorite poets in the state, are also being recognized makes this doubly special.
Thank you to Jericho Brown for his amazing words about my work. I don’t even know what to say about what he has said.
I want to thank Spillway, the Pinch, Connotation Press, the Superstition Review and the Evansville Review for originally publishing these five poems.
I’m thinking today of my late mentor, my late mensch, a great man, Jim Hazard, whom I miss greatly and wish I could share this with.
Most of all, though, I would like to thank the person who helped me choose these poems, the person who kept me from ditching “Still Life” completely. (I was about to throw it out, and she said to me, more or less, “What’s wrong with you?”) She’s my first reader; she’s my best reader; she’s the absolute love of my life, Julie Pallowick. I couldn’t do this without you.”
These poems are two of the five he included in his entry:
IN FEBRUARY, THE UPPER MIDWEST
Despite the cigarette burn sky
the covenant of ice
despite the frayed crocheted shadows,
the exposed lip of the sliced burlap sack
stiffened around top of the root ball
despite the draughts in the walls
the hypnosis clock that clicks
in the other room
despite this morning’s thin arbor vitae
willow-bowed at its waist
despite the cherry pit buds
that we know were fooled by
the weakest grey warm spell
we embrace the lying sun:
the afternoon thaw
of heavy snow melt limp
cedar bough collapsing.
Our shortening shadows
believe the run-off, the slush.
Thirty-six degrees
is unzipped jacket jubilation.
Thirty-six degrees
is a crocus bulb shoot
breaking the top soil
of our hibernation.
STILL LIFE, LONDON:
WATCHING DINNER SERVICE AT BALFOUR AFTER A DAY AT THE TATE
The macramé of her spine, mallet and chisel
shoulders rippled museum smooth:
the waitress’s dress, black strapless, splits
in the back like a weld failure, like metal fatigue.
Behind glass, Bloomsbury constant shuffles –
hearts and knaves against the lights.
Brow thick, mainly salt, he sits across from her.
She walked in using a single crutch, her narrow face
like a pillar, eyes as large and dark as angel fish.
She’s wrapped mustard silk around her throat
like a loose wind pennant pole draped.
The waiter pulls out a chair, sits elbow rested
with them to take their order.
She drinks bottled Coca-Cola through a straw:
he is as distracted as a Russian father:
they are regulars.
In the streetlamps, black taxis stop
like movie extras waiting for cues, their sides
reflecting the legs along the sidewalk.
Nonchalant as cats, they drive off, replaced by others.
When the waitress at the bar ballerina long reaches
at the top shelf for a lager glass: her wrist silver
and knotted twine green as a holiday, on her neck
a delicate cigarette burn birthmark.
(Tell her she is beautiful, someone, please.
In ballet flats, in short skirt, in knit tights,
her bra strap loosedipped over her biceps,
she is beautiful.)
In the silvered sunflower backdrop of the mirror,
I lean against cool tile:
red raspberry, green apple, some fruit
from a South Pacific island – a deeper green:
their colors like a riddle that promises an answer
for pollination, for a wash of sun that turns skin to water,
turns skin to white wine.
If I shift my brush focus, what sideground
will be foreground now?
But the couple:
He drinks his red wine slowly.
His shirt: blueberry striped candy.
She eats from his plate as though they are lovers.
She asks for parmesana. The waiter nods.
The night smells of dill, garlic, pork fat, the brine of shellfish.
She holds her fork like an obscene gesture,
takes a tomato wedge with her tongue.