Once a year it gives us great pleasure to recognize some of the  honors awarded to New England Review’s contributors. Our website and e-newsletter keep readers up to date on our authors’ accomplishments and publications throughout the year, but I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge in print several notable awards and distinctions.

Last summer, longtime NER contributor Natasha Trethewey, whose work first appeared in our pages in 1999 and most recently in 2011, was named the Poet Laureate of the United States, a position which she served with distinction and which she will continue to hold in the coming year.

Poetry Editor C. Dale Young was awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, along with contributors Christian Wiman (30.2) and Sarah Manguso (25.4). This year’s Guggenheim Award went to several other NER contributors: 
Adam Johnson (19.3) and Terese Svoboda (12.1) in fiction; Kate Daniels (10.3) and Cleopatra Mathis (32.2) in poetry. Major Jackson, who recently read in our NER Vermont Reading Series and who offered his judgment for several years as a Reader, was also awarded a Guggenheim in 2013.

This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners in poetry and fiction both published their early work in our pages. Sharon Olds, winner in poetry for her new collection, Stag’s Leap, first appeared in NER in 1979, with the poem “Eggs,” and Adam Johnson, winner in fiction for The Orphan Master’s Son, published the story “The Cassini Satellite” in NER in 1998.

Laura Kasischke, whose writing first appeared in NER in 1994 (16.1) and most recently in 2012 (32.4), won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her book Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon).

Several of our poets have won Literature Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts this year, each receiving an award of $25,000: Traci Brimhall (32.1), Eduardo C. Corral (30.4), and Rachel Richardson (29.1). An award was also made to Jake Adam York (33.3), by whose sudden, premature death in December 2012 we were deeply saddened.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, whose work appears most recently in our current issue, was awarded a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship of $15,000 from the Poetry Foundation.

Longtime contributor Jennifer Grotz has received the Lillian Fairchild Award, which is awarded to a Rochester-area resident who has “created extraordinary artistic work in any medium in the past year.”

This May, Don Share (20.3) was named the new Editor of Poetry magazine.

Greg Pierce’s play Slowgirl, a portion of which appeared in 33.2, enjoyed an extended run as the inaugural play at the Lincoln Center’s new Claire Tow Theater in summer 2012.

Among the winners of the PEN American Center’s 2012 PEN Literary Awards are Quan Barry (27.2), runner-up for the Open Book Award for Water Puppets, and Bill Johnston (25.1,2), winner of the PEN translation prize .

The Lambda Literary Foundation, the country’s leading national nonprofit organization for the LGBT literary community, awarded the 2012 Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize to Stacey D’Erasmo (31.4).

Recently we’ve learned that several works from NER will appear in the 2013 “Best American” anthologies, to be published this fall by Houghton Mifflin. Poems by Laura Kasischke, Adrienne Su (33.1), and Paisley Rekdal (33.2) have been chosen for Best American Poetry 2013, guest edited by Denise Duhamel (series editor David Lehman). “The Ring of Kerry” by Dennis McFadden (33.2) has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2013, edited by Otto Penzler and Lisa Scottoline, and Matthew Vollmer’s “Keeper of the Flame” (33.1) was selected for Best American Essays 2013, guest edited by Cheryl Strayed (series editor Robert Atwan).

The Pushcart Press anthology, which will be released this fall as well, will feature a poem by Jake Adam York, “Self-Portrait as Superman (Alternate Take)” (33.3).

In the meantime, the 2012 Best American anthologies have been released. Selected for Best American Poetry 2012, guest edited by Mark Doty, were Amy Glynn Greacen’s “Helianthus Annus (Sunflower)” (32.2), Reginald Dwayne Betts’s “At the End of a Life, a Secret” (31.4), James Allen Hall’s “One Train’s Survival Depends on the Other Derailed” (32.2), and Natasha Trethewey’s “Dr. Samuel Adolphus Cartwright on Dissecting the White Negro, 1851” (32.3). Scott Landers’s “Age of Heroes” (32.2) and Greg Pierce’s “Later That Night” (32.2) were listed among the other distinguished stories in Best American Short Stories 2012. Michael Cohen’s “A Fountain Pen of Good Repute” (31.4) was selected as a notable essay in Best American Essays 2012, edited by David Brooks, and Best American Mystery Stories 2012 includes Kathleen Ford’s “Man on the Run” (31.4) and cites as notable “The Move” by Debbie Urbanski (32.1) and “Age of Heroes” by Scott Landers.

Another “best” anthology of the year to include writing from NER is Best Music Writing, published by Feedback Press and edited by Questlove of The Roots, with series editor Daphne Carr, which selected Joshua Harmon’s “Speculative Markets and the 7-Inch Single” (32.3).

We thank all these writers for their distinguished work and offer them our sincere congratulations.

—S. D.

 

BEVERLY BURCH is a writer of fiction and poetry whose work has appeared in Poetry Northwest, Willow Springs, Antioch Review, North American Review, and other journals. Her first poetry collection, Sweet to Burn (Gival Press, 2004), won the Gival Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award. She has also published two nonfiction books: On Intimate Terms (University of Illinois Press, 1994) and Other Women (Columbia University Press, 1997). She has a psychotherapy practice in Berkeley, California.

VICTORIA CHANG’s second book of poems, Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008),was published as part of the VQR Poetry Series. Her first book, Circle,was published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2005. She lives in Southern California with her family and works as a business writer and consultant.

BROCK CLARKE is the author of five works of fiction, most recently the novels Exley (Algonquin, 2011) and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (Algonquin, 2008). His fiction and nonfiction have been included in a number of magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies, and have earned him an NEA Literature fellowship, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, among other awards. He teaches at Bowdoin College and lives in Portland, Maine.

CALEB CURTISS teaches high school English in Champaign, Illinois. His poetry has appeared, or will appear soon, in such journals as Hayden’s Ferry Review, Redivider, PANK, and the Literary Review.

BENJAMIN EHRLICH, who graduated from Middlebury College with highest honors in the Program in Literary Studies, is currently a contributing editor to the online magazine The Beautiful Brain and a member of NeuWrite, a collaborative working group for scientists and writers supported by Columbia University. He would like to thank María Ángeles Ramón y Cajal Junquera and the heirs of Santiago Ramón y Cajal for their assistance with the translation project represented in this issue.

CASTLE FREEMAN JR.’s, new collection of stories, Round Mountain, was published in January by the Concord Free Press, in a special edition distributed without cost to aid recovery from Tropical Storm Irene, which devastated parts of central and southern Vermont last August. For more information, please go to www.concordfreepress.com/roundmountain. One of the stories in this collection was originally published in New England Review (Vol. 26, No. 4).

JEFF FRIEDMAN is the author of five collections of poetry; the most recent, Working in Flour, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2011. His poems, mini-stories, and translations have appeared in many literary magazines, including American Poetry Review, Poetry, 5 am, Agni Online, New England Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Antioch Review, Quick Fiction, and the New Republic. A contributing editor to Natural Bridge, he lives in West Lebanon, New Hampshire, with the artist Colleen Randall and their dog, Bekka.

JOSEPH FRUSCIONE’s first book, Faulkner and Hemingway: Biography of a Literary Rivalry, was published by Ohio State University Press in January 2012. An adjunct professor of English at Georgetown University and adjunct assistant professor of First-Year Writing at George Washington University, he has published articles and reviews about a number of American authors. His account of Ralph Ellison’s complex relationship with Hemingway will be included in a forthcoming collection entitled Hemingway and the Black Renaissance (Ohio State University Press, 2012).

WILLIAM GILSON is an American living permanently in northwest England. He has published essays, poetry, and fiction. Carved in Stone, the Artistry of Early New England Gravestones (Wesleyan University Press, 2012),a collaboration with the photographer Thomas Gilson, will be published this fall, and includes the essay “Stone Faces,” which first appeared in New England Review (Vol. 30, No. 4).

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE (1749–1832) was the author of numerous highly influential fictional narratives, poems, dramatic works, autobiographical writings, and essays in scientific analysis. Among his most widely read works are his epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), and his two-part dramatic poem, Faust (1808–1831).

DEBORA GREGER’s latest book of poems, By Herself, will be published by Penguin in the fall of 2012.

KAREN HOLMBERG’s second book of poems, Axis Mundi, won the John Ciardi Prize and will be published in the fall of 2012 by BkMk Press. Her poetry and nonfiction have appeared in such magazines as Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, West Branch, Cave Wall, Black Warrior Review, and Cimarron Review. She teaches poetry writing in the M.F.A. program at Oregon State University.

SHARA LESSLEY is a former Stegner Fellow and the author of Two-Headed Nightingale (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2012). Her awards include an Artist Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, the Tickner Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize. She currently lives in the Middle East.

JOHN LUNDBERG has published poems in Poetry, VQR, Threepenny Review, Southern Review, and other journals. He lives and works in Brooklyn, where he writes a weekly poetry column for the Huffington Post.

MATTHEW NIENOW’s latest chapbook is The End of the Folded Map (Codhill Press, 2011). Recent poems have appeared in Agni Online, Blackbird, and New England Review, and are forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Crazyhorse, and Poetry Northwest. He received an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011 and has been awarded scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among other grants and fellowships. He lives with his family in Port Townsend, Washington, where he works as a boatbuilder.

C. L. O’DELL’s poems are published or forthcoming in Asheville Poetry Review, Many Mountains Moving,and Texas Review,among other journals. He received an M.A. at Manhattanville College, where he served as Poetry Competition Editor of Inkwell. Currently, he is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

CARL PHILLIPS teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. His new book of poems, Silverchest, will appear from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 2013.

PAUL PLAGENS is a musician and songwriter who lives in Los Angeles. His band, Greta, recorded two albums on Mercury/Polygram in the 1990s, and he has performed solo since then.

SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL (1852–1934), winner of a 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, published more than three hundred articles and fifteen books. Among his non-technical texts translated into English are Advice for a Young Investigator (trans. Larry and Neely Swanson), Vacation Stories (trans. Laura Otis), and Recollections of My Life (trans. E. Horne Craigie and Juan Cano). He taught anatomy and histology at the Universities of Valencia, Barcelona, and Madrid. In 1901, he was appointed the first director of the Biological Research Laboratory (now the Cajal Institute), where he continued to work until his death.

JANE RATCLIFFE has her Masters’ in Creative Writing from Columbia University.  Her first novel, The Free Fall, was published by Henry Holt and picked by the New York Public Library as a Notable Book of 2002. One of her essays was included in Lost and Found: Stories from New York edited by Thomas Beller. Her short stories and journalism have appeared in the Sun, Vogue, Interview, VH1, Guernica, Tricycle, and other publications.

JENNIFER RILEY is a painter and arts writer who lives and works in New York City. In addition to exhibiting her work regularly, she has reviewed art for the New York Sun, Brooklyn Rail, and ArtCritical.com, where she is a contributing editor. A lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Indiana University, she was a recipient in 2004 of the Award in Painting from the Massachusetts State Cultural Council. She is represented in New York by Allegra LaViola and in Boston by Carroll & Sons.

RICHARD J. SMITH is the George and Nancy Rupp Professor of Humanities and a professor of history at Rice University. His many books include Different Worlds of Discourse: Transformations of Gender and Genre in Late Qing and Early Republican China (Brill, 2008) and Fathoming the Cosmos and Ordering the World: The Yijing (I-Ching, or  Classic of Changes) and Its Evolution in China (University of Virginia Press, 2008).

CHRISTINE SNEED’s short story collection, Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize and was a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her second book, a novel titled Little Known Facts, will be published by Bloomsbury USA in February 2013. She has published several stories in New England Review; one was reprinted in Best American Short Stories 2008, another in PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012.

ADRIENNE SU is the author of three books of poems: Middle Kingdom (Alice James, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009). Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize and an NEA Literature Fellowship. She is poet-in-residence and chair of the English department at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. Recent poems appear in the New Republic, Kenyon Review, and Hawai’i Pacific Review.

FRANCIS-NOËL THOMAS and the cognitive scientist Mark Turner were awarded a Prix du rayonnement de la langue et la littérature françaises by the Académie française in 1996 for their study of classic prose style, Clear and Simple as the Truth. Princeton University Press published a second edition of this book in both traditional and digital formats in spring 2011.

MATTHEW VOLLMER teaches in the M.F.A. program at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Future Missionaries of America (Salt Publishing, 2010), a collection of stories. His work has appeared in a number of literary magazines, including the Paris Review, Tin House, VQR, Epoch, Oxford American, Ecotone, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Carolina Quarterly. With David Shields, he has co-edited Fakes: An Anthology of Pseudo-Interviews, Faux-Lectures, Quasi-Letters, and Other Fraudulent Artifacts, forthcoming from Norton.

VALERIE WOHLFELD’s first collection, Thinking the World Visible (Yale University Press, 1994), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poetry book Woman with Wing Removed was published in 2010 by Truman State University Press. She received an M.F.A. from Vermont College. Her work has appeared in Yale Review, Hopkins Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.