Daniels, professor of English, will devote part of her fellowship to writing new poems based on archival research into the records of Eastern State Hospital. Established in Virginia in 1770 as The Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds, Eastern State Hospital, which remains in operation today, was the first public institution for the mentally ill in the United States.

“Part of my interest in capturing this subject matter is related to two of my classes: ‘The Art of Medical Writing’ and ‘Why Write: Perspectives on Literary Creativity,’” Daniels said. “Both of these investigate poetic language, literary creativity, and the psychology of creative writers.”

Daniels will also be considering through poetry the many connections between medicine/illness/health care and creative writing. She will focus in particular on bipolar disease, including its prevalence among poets, and she will be looking for new ways of understanding the role of bipolar disease in linguistic creativity and literary production.

Daniels, who directs Vanderbilt’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, is an affiliated faculty member in the Center for Medicine, Health and Society. She previously served as associate dean in the College of Arts and Science. She earned her master’s degree from the University of Virginia, as well as a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University. Recent poems of Daniels, who came to Vanderbilt in 1994, have been published in Best American Poetry 2010 and Best American Poetry 2008. Her books include A Walk in Victoria’s Secret (LSU 2010), Four Testimonies (LSU, 1998) and The Niobe Poems (Pittsburgh, 1989). She has received the Pushcart Prize, the James Dickey Prize and the Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hanes Award for Poetry, among others.

September 26: Kevin Young  poetry

October 3: Steve Stern fiction

October 24:  Lynn Emanuel poetry

November 7: Justin Torres  fiction

January 16: Dwight Garner  nonfiction

January 23: Christine Schutt  fiction

January 30:  David Wojahn  poetry

February 6: Edmund White  fiction

February 20: Julie Bruck  poetry

March 27: Claudia Emerson  poetry

March 28: Chris Bachelder  fiction

April 10:  Eavan Boland  poetry

First year MFA student, Edgar Kunz has won first prize in the 2013 Academy of American Poets contest.  Miriam Mimms in the MLAS program received Honorable Mention.  Poet Thomas Lux judged.

Second year MFA student Chris Adamson received the 2013 Sedberry Prize for Poetry and first year MFA student Lee Conell received the 2013 Guy Goffe Means Prize for Fiction.

The Writing Studio MFA Graduate Consultant Prize went to first year MFA student in poetry Anne Charlton.

Undergraduate student prizes in creative writing

Graduating senior Elizabeth Furlow received the 2013 Merrill Moore Prize for Fiction and graduating senior Cathy Zhang received the  2013 Merrill Moore Prize for Poetry.

Third year graduate fellowships

Second year MFA student in fiction Claire Jimenez has been appointed Curb Creative Writing Fellow for 2013-14.   Second year MFA student in poetry Cara Dees and and second year MFA student in fiction Marysa LaRowe have received third year fellowships in Creative Writing for the 2013-14 academic year.  And graduating MFA student in fiction, Janet Thielke, received a post-MFA Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Creative Writing.

“Carrie Causey’s Ear to the Wall introduces us to a refreshingly genuine lyrical intelligence that is sure-footed, sprinter-quick, and ready to bewitch. We are led through the dreamscapes of Causey’s childhood—the bayous and waterways of the Atchafalaya Swamp—and there encounter its many restless spirits, including women ‘spell-locked in walls, still trying to get out.’ The collection’s cumulative power is due in no small part to Causey’s formidable empathic gifts. Even when one speaker becomes ‘bright with the terror of too many gods,’ Causey still manages to take us to a place ‘that makes everything sacred’ where we, her fortunate readers, become ‘the bemused witness[es] to grace/working its cold sacrament.’ This is a stunning collection, immensely powerful, dream-haunted and river-wise.” – Rick Hilles, author of Brother Salvage and Map of the Lost World.

“Open that door just a crack, peek inside: trouble and enchantment await. You will find, I believe, Ms. Causey’s work is at once precise and expansive, meticulous and loose in the best possible way. The plain-spoken surrealism of her images strikes the balance one hopes for and so rarely finds. She’s one to be reckoned with.” — Daniel Lawless, editor of Plume Poetry.

Lorrie Moore, photo by Zane Williams

Lorrie Moore, whose much praised    short-story collections include Birds of America and Like Life, will join Vanderbilt’s Creative Writing Program faculty as the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English in fall 2013  (appointment pending approval by the Vanderbilt Board of Trust).

“Lorrie is the essence of original expression and commentary. Her unique voice illuminates her poignant and brilliant writing, and she represents a terrific addition to our world-class English faculty,” said Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos. “She is the latest example of the university’s strong commitment to investing in exceptional faculty who provide transformative learning opportunities for our students.”

“We are thrilled to welcome Lorrie to Vanderbilt, with its storied history in creative writing, where she will have the opportunity to work with some of the nation’s most promising young writers,” said Carolyn Dever, dean of the College of Arts and Science and professor of English.

Moore’s most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs (Random House), was described in a New York Times book review as “…her most powerful book yet, a book that gives us an indelible portrait of a young woman coming of age in the Midwest in the year after 9/11 and her initiation into the adult world of loss and grief.” Honors for the book include finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Orange Prize: Shortlist, and Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for Fiction. Her books also include Anagrams and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?

“Lorrie is an extraordinary writer,” said Kate Daniels, professor of English and director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Vanderbilt. “Not only one of the most celebrated and widely respected of contemporary American authors, she is esteemed as well for her teaching and mentoring of young writers. Her presence among us will be a great addition to the Nashville literary community and a boon for our growing master of fine arts program in creative writing. We look forward with great happiness to having her join us.”

In 1985 Moore’s career took off with the publication of Self-Help, a collection of short stories that was also her master’s thesis at Cornell University. Earlier, she had graduated summa cum laude from St. Lawrence University.

“Lorrie’s the most influential short story writer working in America, and has been been for the last 20 years,” said Tony Earley, the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English at Vanderbilt. “Ordinarily I would say that our MFA students have no idea how lucky they are, but they know exactly how lucky they are. They actually shouted with joy when they heard. I did, too, but first I made sure nobody could hear me.”

Moore is currently the Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her many honors have included fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Lannan Foundation.

Moore has written for The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Yorker,The Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. Other previous honors include the Rea Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the art of the short story, and The Irish Times International Fiction Prize. Moore, who is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, spoke at Vanderbilt in January 2012 as part of the Chancellor’s Lecture Series. Her talk was titled “Creative Writing and the Customer Survey.”

His fiction has appeared in such publications as American Short Fiction, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, Meridian, Conjunctions, Redivider, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Best Of The Net. He also serves as translator for an “interlinked novel” titled The Numberless, a “randomized novella” titled Kaleidoscope, and an “intentionally posthumous” serialized novel titled Afterthought.   He has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center.

The judges noted that Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems collects poems from Mark Jarman’s eight previous books along with a generous selection of new poems. They cited the title poem, recalling the original meaning of “bonfire” as a religious ritual to ensure the return of light from the darkness of winter, which, they found, points to the essentially spiritual nature of Jarman’s lifelong poetic quest. They were impressed by the “clarity and simplicity of his diction, the musicality and cadence of his voice and keenness of perception in which ordinary experience is rendered luminous and the extraordinary, transcendent.” “The language is simple and straightforward, but beautifully rendered and able to show complicated ideas and feelings as if they were tangible things.” He “listens like truth”…and offers poems that are “nothing less than the soul’s labour, it’s singing.”

Former winners of the Balcones Poetry Prize include Chase Twichell, Arthur Sze, and Reginald Gibbons.  The four finalists for the 2011 award were:

• Songs of Unreason, Jim Harrison (Copper Canyon Press)
• Space, In Chains, Laura Kasischke (Copper Canyon Press)
• The Politics, Benjamin Paloff (Carnegie Mellon University Press)
• The World Falls Away, Wanda Coleman (University of Pittsburgh Press)

Earley has also recently been interviewed by Chapter 16, an online publication of Humanities Tennessee, which promotes education in the humanities for people in Tennessee.

Hilles says that this new book feels connected with his first collection, Brother Salvage (winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) because they share a certain set of obsessions: “memory, what is at risk of getting lost.”

“A Map of the Lost World is an important book, combining history with lyric gravity. Rick Hilles writes of modern life in language that is beautiful and magical, having an intensity that compels as it startles. In poems of World War II (“A Map of The Lost World” and “The Red Scarf & The Black Briefcase”), we read of an American’s search for self as well as for the fate of Auschwitz prisoners. By turns Hilles thrills, excites, intrigues, and terrifies, as he finds in the past insights into the world around him and presents a landscape ‘full of secrets only some of them benign.’” —Grace Schulman

“Like John Keats, who is in many ways the presiding spirit of this exquisitely true and beautiful gathering of poems, Rick Hilles is a poet with genuine authority, licensed to lead us to the lost world where great poets, dear friends and righteous survivors pay tribute to what it means to be human, to love and bear witness even beyond death. This is a truly wonderful book.” —Lorna Goodison