Reading at AWP2018

Leave a comment

I was beyond flattered to be a part of the Butler University MFA reading panel at AWP18, especially when it included such luminous writers and poets as Kaveh Akbar, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Doug Manuel.

I can’t say enough about the Butler MFA program in Creative Writing. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made and one that changed my life a thousand times for the better. (Not to mention all the amazing people and fellow writers I’ve met along the way!)

 

Winner of Redivider 2017 Beacon Street Prize in Nonfiction

I am absolutely thrilled to announce that my essay “I Plead the Blood” has been named as the winner of the Redivider 2017 Beacon Street Prize in Nonfiction judged by Ned Stuckey-French.

Here are Mr. Stuckey-French’s comments:

“This essay is brave and important. It tells the story of growing up in a fundamentalist church – a cult really – and the narrator’s first, hard-won, tentative steps away from the ‘endless lists of forbidden activities [that] restricted our lives to a pinpoint of experience.’ The narrative is gripping and immediate, but rendered with a smart, self-deprecating retrospection: ‘I’d learned that the only way to get through it was to split into two selves: public self, the devout one who played the tambourine for all the songs, and private self, the sweaty hysteric who knew she was faking it.’

And there is humor too. When asked, nay forced, to speak in tongues she falls back on some nursery rhyme, Saturday morning cartoon gibberish she knows is fake: ‘Bananarama-schlonken-lonken. Bananarama-bo-blonken-lonken.’ At one point she tells us, ‘My sisters and I preferred crocheted doilies as our head covering, but in a pinch, we’d use a baby’s burp cloth or a tissue.’ Burp cloth! Elsewhere, forced to wash the feet of fellow parishioners, all she can think of is how their ‘[t]hick, yellowed toenails curled up at the ends and reminded me of Fritos.’

I admire ‘I Plead the Blood’ and its author very much.”

2017 Beacon Street Prize in Nonfiction Winner

Winner of Redivider 2016 Blurred Genre Contest for Flash Nonfiction

Leave a comment

Happy day! I’ve just learned that my essay “Eleven Signs My Bipolar Moods Are Cycling” has been named the winner of the 2016 Redivider Blurred Genre Contest for Flash Nonfiction, judged by Jerald Walker.

Here are Mr. Walker’s comments:

“Outstanding prose coupled with the chaos of a mind in crisis results in a reading experience that is both pleasurable and troublesome. The writer so deftly builds her character on the page that you root for her as you would a relative or good friend, hoping against all evidence that she will suddenly, miraculously, break free of her disease. And even though she doesn’t, the reader can take comfort in the writer’s comfort that the cycle will invariably turn upward, allowing her to have, however brief, a reprieve.”

You can read the essay here:

http://www.redividerjournal.org/4960-2/