A number of awards and honors for UW-Madison writers on this blustery Monday morning:

Our former MFA and Institute Fellow, KEVIN GONZALEZ (pictured) won first place in Narrative's story competition for writers under the age of 30 for his short story Cerromar.

Former Institute Fellow, DANIELLE EVANS' story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self was named one of O Magazine's top ten books of 2010--#4 to be precise.

The Sunday New York Times Book Review has selected the novel Angelology by former undergraduate DANIELLE TRUSSONI and the short story collection Memory Wall by former Institute fellow ANTHONY DOERR as two of its Notable Books of 2010.

Tenure Track Fiction Position in Philly

St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia is looking to hire a tenure-track assistant professor of English with an expertise in fiction writing. Former Madisonian and creative writing instructor Tenaya Darlington is on the search committee, which will be conducting interviews at AWP. For more information, click here.

Congrats to current MFA poet KAI CARLSON-WEE whose work appears in the anthology Best New Poets 2010. Kai will be reading in Madison on December 9. More details to follow.

UW Creative Writing presents Ethan Canin, 12/2

The UW Program in Creative Writing presents Ethan Canin next Thursday, December 2nd, at 7:00 pm. The event will be held in Helen C. White Hall, room 6191. You can RSVP to this event on Facebook.

ETHAN CANIN is the author of two collections of short stories (Emperor of the Air, 1988, and The Palace Thief, 1994) and four novels: Blue River (1992), For Kings and Planets (1999), Carry Me Across the Water (2001), and America, America (2008). He is on faculty at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and divides his time between Iowa and northern Michigan. He is also a physician.

It's official. Wisconsin's own Jane Hamilton will be reading at THE MADISON REVIEW's celebration of its Fall/Winter 2010 issue on December 18.

The reading begins at 8pm at the Overture Center for the Arts at 201 State Street. It's followed by an after-party at the Orpheum at 216 State. There's a $5.00 cover at the party.

Much more information at The Madison Review's facebook page.

Congratulations to former undergrad PATRICK SOMMERVILLE on the release of his third book and second story collection, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature. Here's a great review in the online Boston Globe.

In The News

Congratulations to Terrance Hayes, this semester's Peter Straub Visiting Poet. Terrance was in Madison last week, reading from his work, meeting with students, and generally hanging out. Now this week he's gone and won the National Book Award for his collection Lightheaded.

And in today's NY Times book blog Paper Cuts, an article about Monday night's Jonathan Franzen/LORRIE MOORE reading at the 92nd St. Y.

TONIGHT: former undergrad ADAM FELL, former MFA and current HEAF fellow, LAUREL BASTIAN, along with Matthew Guenette, Angela Woodward, Lewis Freedman, Danez Smith and Alice Miller, read their poetry.

7 pm

The DeRicci Gallery

Edgewood College

CWW Announces 2010 Contests

The Council for Wisconsin Writers invites submissions for writing published in 2010 by Wisconsin authors in the following contest categories: book-length works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry; short fiction and nonfiction; children’s literature; outdoor writing; and a set of five individual poems. The submission period opened November 1 and closes on January 31, 2011, the postmark deadline.

All submitters must be current residents of Wisconsin. An award of $500 will be made in each category. Entry fee is $20.00; out-of-state judges will make the selections.

Nominations are also open for the $1000 Major Achievement Award, which is given to a writer for one or more distinguished publications over the past five years, a growing reputation as an important literary artist, or a lifetime of career achievement.

Specific guidelines, entry forms, and important additional information for each category are available on the website, www.wisconsinwriters.org, or by writing contest co-chair Marilyn L. Taylor, 2825 E. Newport Ave., Milwaukee 53211, indicating the contest categories needed. CWW is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting Wisconsin's literary heritage and writers.

The Monsters of Poetry present a reading featuring our own RON KUKA, along with Marc Rahe, Dan Poppick, and Blueberry Morningsnow. The event takes place on Friday, Nov. 12, at 7:30 pm over at Project Lodge. Details can be found on the Monsters of Poetry website.

A note from Judy Mitchell:

Hi All.

My husband Don Friedlich's art jewelry will be featured at a benefit for CERF+, an organizaion that provides loans and grants to craft artists who have experienced disasters that prevent them from working. CERF+ has helped artists who have suffered life-threatening illnesses or natural disasters such as floods, hurricanes, and studio fires. As you can imagine, most craft artists cannot afford health or other insurance, so this kind of aid is incredibly important.

The benefit will be held on Thursday Nov, 11th at HYART Gallery on 133 Johnson St. (off State Street heading east). It is free and open to the public. The hours are 5:30 to 8:00, meaning you can come, see Don's work, and still make it to the Terrance Hayes reading at 7:00. (No pressure, of course. I'm just saying if you want to do both, you can.)

10% of all of HYART's sales at the benefit and through the weekend will go to CERF+

For more info on Don, here's a link to a WSJ article that ran this Sunday.

xoxo,

Judy

PS. The image above is a brooch of blue glass and gold.

Blue Ox Reading, 11/18

A Blue Ox Reading

Nov. 18th, 7:30 pm
Gates of Heaven Synagogue
302 East Gorham

The second and final Blue Ox Reading for the fall will be held Thursday, November 18th at 7:30 pm at the Gates of Heaven Synagogue (302 East Gorham), off James Madison Park. The Blue Ox Series presents the work of students in their second year of the MFA Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

JACQUES J. RANCOURT was raised in Maine and is now pursuing his MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he acts as poetry editor for Devil's Lake. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming from 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Passages North, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, among others, and his work has been anthologized in Dzanc's Best of the Web.

LOUISA DIODATO is an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she holds the Martha Meier-Renk Distinguished Graduate Fellowship in Poetry and acts as Managing Editor/Webmaster for Devil's Lake. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poet Lore, Puerto del Sol, and Cimarron Review, among others. She was awarded a 2009 Julia Fonville Smithson Prize from Bucknell University and a 2009-2010 AWP Intro Journals Award.

KAI CARLSON-WEE was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota and grew up in Northfield and Moorhead, Minnesota, moved to California for a while, returned to Minneapolis. Went abroad for a while. Spent the last few years traveling around, living here and there, doing this and that, hiking to high places, surviving himself as a cook. He likes to drink coffee and watch movies and rollerblade. He is currently working on an MFA at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he serves as the Devil's Lake media coordinator.

Terrance Hayes Reading, 11/11

Thursday, November 11th
7:00 PM
Helen C. White #6191

The Program in Creative Writing presents

TERRANCE HAYES

Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry: Lighthead (Penguin, 2010), a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award; Wind in a Box (2006); Hip Logic (2002), which won the 2001 National Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Muscular Music (1999), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

Congratulations to former Institute fiction fellow SUSANNA DANIEL, whose novel Stiltsville was named one of the top ten debut books of 2010.

The Blue Ox Reading Series takes place each fall semester and features our second year MFA students. The series was named for the murals decorating the small Paul Bunyan room in Memorial Union where these readings first took place. Almost immediately, the Blue Ox series proved so popular that we had to leave Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox behind in favor of larger venues...but the name has stuck.

At the first Blue Ox reading of the current semester the UW-Madison writing community--MFAs, undergrads, Institute fellows, faculty, proud parents of poets, and friends--packed the beautiful Gates of Heaven Synogogue to hear the poetry of NANCY REDDY, JOSH KALSCHEUR, and BRI CAVALLARO. It was a wonderful reading and a wonderful evening.

The next Blue Ox reading, featuring LOUISA DIODATO, JACQUES RANCOURT, and KAI CARLSON-WIE, will also be held at the Gates of Heaven on Thursday November 18 at 7:30.

Our alum PETER STRAUB, renowned author of over 30 books of prose and poetry, breaks new ground in his newest release, his first graphic novel, The Green Woman, co-written with Michael Easton. There's an interesting article about how Peter teamed up with his co-author, an actor on the daytime soap opera One Life to Live, here.

Peter also received two World Fantasy Awards last week. American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny: From Poe to the Pulps/From the 1940s to Now, which Peter edited, won the award for best anthology. And Peter himself received a Life Achievement Award.

Spork Crown-Shaped Reading, 11/5

8:00 PM on Friday, Nov. 5th
The Project Lodge

This Friday, November 5th, the ______ Shaped Reading Series presents Laurel Bastian, John Bradley, and Seth Landman at the Project Lodge (817 East Johnson St., Madison WI). You can find more about this reading series at their blog, readingshaped.wordpress.com.

LAUREL BASTIAN is the Halls Emerging Artist Fellow for 2010-2011, awarded by the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is on the faculty of Madison College, teaches creative writing at the University of Wisconsin Madison, runs a creative writing program for incarcerated adults, and curates "CROSSHATXH," a new and dynamic reading series based here in Madison. You can read some of her recent publications at her website.

JOHN BRADLEY is the author of Terrestrial Music (Curbstone Press), War on Words (BlazeVOX), and You Don't Know What You Don't Know (Cleveland State University Poetry Center), winner of the 2009 Open Competition. He is the editor of three anthologies: Atomic Ghost: Poets Respond to the Nuclear Age (Coffee House Press), Learning to Glow: A Nuclear Reader (University of Arizona Press), and Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath (Blackwaters Press). Bradley is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Northern Illinois University.

SETH LANDMAN lives in Denver, Colorado and is a member of the Agnes Fox Press Collective. He has two chapbooks: The Wild Hawk Sea (Minutes Books, 2010), and (Laminated Cats Ltd., 2009). Other poems appear (or will appear) in jubilat, VOLT, Boston Review, Forklift, Ohio, and other places.

EMMA STRAUB, former MFA fiction writer and HEAF fellow, writes about how writers have influenced her real estate decisions in a very lovely piece up on The Paris Review's website.

And, by the way, the Wallace Stegner quote about Madison that Emma mentions in the article may not be on any tee-shirts, but it has been on the home page of the Creative Writing Program's website ever since Emma brought it to our attention.

Also, the picture above, which illustrates Emma's article, is by Berenice Abbott. This is Patchin Place where e.e. cummings--and Emma--once lived.