The MFA Student Community at Whidbey Writers’ Workshop

More honors for David Wagoner

David Wagoner will be the featured speaker at the Theodore Roethke Centenary Celebration at Penn State University on November 6 and 7, cosponsored by their Institute of the Arts and Humanities, the English Deptartment and the School of Music. The program will include musical settings of Roethke’s poems as well as a reading by Wagoner of his own poetry.

David Wagoner has also been appointed a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow, one of about 100 from all disciplines—ex-cabinet members, diplomats, writers, retired judges, the head of the ACLU, the director of the League of Women Voters, etc. Under the jurisdiction of Princeton, their bios and curriculums are posted for the delight of about 250 independent colleges all over the country. The administrators of those colleges select a visiting fellow and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation finances the week-long stay of that Visiting Fellow on campus, giving a lecture, tutoring or work- shopping students, reading his/her own work, and so on.

Stefanie Freele has been named SmokeLong Quarterly’s writer in residence for 2008. Here’s part of the announcement, which may be read in full here:

“After poring over 90 applications, the editors of SmokeLong are ecstatic to announce that Stefanie Freele will be our Fish Fellowship “writer in residence” for 2008. This was not an easy choice - the quality of the applications we received was outstanding.”

“Stefanie Freele was born and raised in Wisconsin and currently lives on a river on the west coast. Her recent fiction credits include American Literary Review, South Dakota Review, Permafrost, Westview, Hobart, and Contrary. She will have forthcoming work in Talking River, Etchings, and in a speculative fiction anthology titled Futuristic Motherhood. She has completed a novel and is working on her MFA thesis with the Whidbey Writers Workshop in Washington.”

More honors for Carmen T. Bernier-Grand

The Oregon Library Association’s Children’s Division 2008 Evelyn Sibley Lampman Award “For Significant Contributions to the Children of Oregon in the Field of Children’s Literature.”

Frida: ¡Viva la vida! Long Live Life!, written and illustrated Carmen T. Bernier-Grand (Marshall Cavendish), has been named 2008 Pura Belpré Author Honor Award Winner and has also been named an American Library Association Notable Book Award.

“Frida: ¡Viva la vida! Long Live Life! uses lyrical free-verse poems which comprise the heart of a well rounded biographical work for older children. The poems, written in impassioned first-person voice, follow the arc of Frida Kahlo’s life from birth to death. The opening birth poem and the closing death poem set a tone of self-determination firmly placing her in history, in her family and in her country.”

More honors for Kathleen Alcala

Kathleen Alcala read on March 5 at Benaroya Hall as part of a series of readings by readings by twelve selected recipients of the Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowships from the last 20 years. Seattle Arts & Lectures, Artist Trust, and the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, in celebration of their 20th anniversaries, co-sponsored the readings.

Kathleen Alcala’s The Desert Remembers My Name: On Family and Writing was recently selected as one of Margaret Guerrero’s “Top Picks” in the 2007 Southwest Books of the Year competition. Southwest Books of the Year is a prestigious award in Southern Arizona sponsored by the Pima County Public Library, Friends of the Pima County Public Library, Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records, and the Arizona Historical Society.

Recognition for Susan Zwinger

Susan Zwinger has an important essay in a new book, Teaching About Place, edited by Laird Christensen and Hal Crimmel, University of Nevada Press. The book focuses on teaching students about their local ecology, geology, economics, community planning and sociology in order to, as Susan says, “restore a powerful belief in our connection to the landscape which holds us.”

Bruce Holland Rogers continues to put his time in Europe to good use

Rogers has been invited to read and speak at an English-language literary festival in Vienna which is funded in part by the U.S. Embassy.

At the invitation of the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon, Whidbey MFA instructor Bruce Holland Rogers in November spent four days in Portugal speaking about creative writing. He was a guest at the Universidade Lusófona’s annual conference on the fantastic where he debated the future of the short story with Portuguese authors and read from his award-winning story collection The Keyhole Opera (just published in Portugal as Pequenos mistérios). Helectured on “The Creative Writing Workshop” at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa and on “The Psychology of Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular” at the Universidade Clássica de Lisboa.

Recognition for Bonny Becker’s latest

Barnes and Noble has selected Bonny Becker’s new picture book, A Visitor for Bear (Candlewick), for its picture book wall for the month of March. A Visitor for Bear will be on display at all major stores across the country. The wall of face-out books features about 25 new picture books each month.

A Visitor for Bear will also receive a *starred* review from the upcoming February issue of School Library Journal.

Honors for a member of our Governing Board

Lorraine Healy, MFA (New England College), the newest member of the MFA Governing Board, has recently been awarded the Lois Cranston Poetry Prize by Calyx Press as well as the PostRoad Poetry Prize, awarded by the journal of Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. Ms. Healy, a native of Argentina and a resident of Freeland, Washington, teaches poetry at Antioch University in Seattle and through the Whidbey Island Writers Association’s community classes.

More Honors for Carolyne L. Wright

Carolyne L. Wright has been the Thornton Writer (Poet) in Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia, for eight weeks from January - March 2008.

That post is followed by serving as the Distinguished Northwest Poet at Seattle University for spring quarter (end of March - mid-June). Both of these short-term posts, she says, will leave time for her own writing and for Whidbey courses.

There is also a new review of A Change of Maps, by Carolyne Wright, published in “The Cortland Review”:http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/08/spring/rigsbee_r.html