Leo Love Merit Scholarship in Poetry Winner, Sara Parrell

Sara Parrell was awarded first prize in the 2008 Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading for five poems from her manuscript Psalms of New Orleans, which was also a finalist in the 2010 Concrete Wolf chapbook contest. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, qarrtsiluni,  Wisconsin People and Ideas (including winning poems in the 2007 poetry contest), the anthology Lake Wingra Morning, and other journals. Her collaboration with photographer Thomas Ferrella (“Borderlands”) was reflected in her essay “Beyond Ekphrasis: Collaboration as a Journey” in Verse Wisconsin, nominated for Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web 2010. In 2012, she co-founded the Bridge Poetry Series in concert with The Chazen Art Museum in Madison, Wisconsin (where she lives), bringing together poets from across Wisconsin to create a community of diverse voices and perspectives. Sara is faculty at the UW-Madison School of Nursing and works with the Madison Metropolitan School District’s mental health consultation team.

Hispanic Writer Award Winner, Mario Gonzales

Mario J. Gonzales was born in Fresno, California.  He was raised in Parlier, California, a Mexican-American community his grandparents settled in as farmworkers in the 1920’s.  Mario graduated from California State University, Fresno in 1988 with a degree in Psychology.  In 1993 he received a master’s in Southwest studies from New Mexico Highlands University and in 1997 he earned a doctorate from Washington State University in Cultural Anthropology.  Along the way he was worked moving other people’s furniture, picked raisin grapes, worked in the cold storage of fruit packing sheds, played high school football with the starting quarterback of the Nebraska Cornhuskers, hitchhiked in Europe and Mexico, almost drowned in a Oaxacan river and had nice conversations with Rigoberta Menchu, bell hooks and A.L. Kennedy as well as many others. 

For the past fourteen years he has been a professor of cultural anthropology in Texas and New Mexico. His fiction and non-fiction can be found in the Wicazo Sa Review, Rio Grande Review, The Santa Fe Reporter, The Bacon Review, The Cossack Review and Red Ochre LiT.

Currently he lives in Santa Fe, NM with his three children.  He continues to write fiction and non-fiction and dedicates his award to his children, his mother and Tia without whom meaningful words would not be possible.

Leo Love Merit Scholarship in Prose Winner, Kim Bradley

Kim Bradley grew up in Monroeville, Alabama. She received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Auburn University, and an MFA in fiction from the University of New Orleans. Her short fiction has appeared in Kalliope, The Southern Indiana Review, and The Louisville Review. An excerpt of her novel-in-progress, Mercury’s Net, was a semifinalist in the 2011 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Wisdom competition. She’s taught poetry to at-risk middle-school children, and edited a collection of their poems called, Juice up the True Say. She lives in St. Augustine, Florida, where she teaches composition and creative writing at Flagler College.



Native Writer Award Winner, Cynthia Sylvester

Cynthia Sylvester was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was born into the Kiyaa'anni (Towering House) clan for the Bilagaana (White) Clan. She received her Bachelor of Arts & Sciences from the University of New Mexico and, along side another Dine (Navajo) student, was the first Native American to graduate from the UNM Physical Therapy Program. During her coursework at UNM she studied Native American Art & Literature and was recently named The Bosque Discovery in October 2011. Her first story "We Wander" was published in the inaugural issue of bosque – the magazine. Her work as a writer is to explore and attempt to navigate the lines and boundaries, whether real or imagined, in this world. Cynthia is currently working on a collection of short stories entitled, The Half White Album and has finished two novels: The Perpetual Pickle and The Sixth World.  She currently lives in Los Ranchos, NM with her partner of ten years and two of the characters from her novel, The Perpetual Pickle, her dogs Jakeloo and Lucy. Family is what is most important to her and she is honored to accept the Native Writer Award for herself and to honor her parents.

As winner of the Native Writer Award, Cynthia will be giving a reading on Tuesday July 17, 2012, at 12:30 p.m.

D.H. Lawrence Fellowship Winner, Kristen-Paige Madonia

Kristen-Paige Madonia's debut novel Fingerprints of You will be published in August 2012 by Simon & Schuster and recent short fiction can be found in Upstreet, New Orleans Review, American Fiction: Best Previously Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Sycamore Review, Inkwell, and South Dakota Review. She is a Sewanee Writers' Conference Tennessee Williams Scholar and has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Hedgebrook Writers' Retreat, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Studios of Key West. She was the 2010 recipient of the New Orleans Literary Festival/Tennessee Williams award and was awarded the Marianne Russo Fellowship to attend the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar. She holds an MFA from California State University, Long Beach and teaches creative writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA where she is at work on her second novel.

As the D.H. Lawrence Fellow, Kristen-Paige will be giving a reading on Monday July 16, 2012, at 12:30 p.m.

Laura Brodie Updates

Laura Brodie's short story, "Spiderman Summer," was recently selected for inclusion in the new edition of The Bedford Introduction to Literature, which is coming out in January.  This is Laura's debut inclusion in an anthology. Congratulations, Laura!

In case you really wanted to take Laura's class but missed getting in, a space recently opened up in her Novel-in-Progress weeklong workshop. Register now!