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Julia Story (MFA 04 ) and Margaret Ronda (MFA 03) win poetry prizes and book publication Congratulations to Julia and Margaret for their achievements! From Poets & Writers (Nov. 2009): Julia Story of Somerville, Massachusetts, won the 15th annual Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry for her collection Post Moxie. Dan Chiasson judged. David Philip Mullins of Omaha won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction for his collection True Love Versus the Cigar Store Indian. David Means judged. Each received $2,000, and their collections will be published by Sarabande Books. The awards are given for collections of poetry and stories or short novels. The next deadline is February 15, 2010. Sarabande Books, Morton and McCarthy Prizes, P.O. Box 4456, Louisville, KY 40204. (502) 458-4028. www.sarabandebooks.org Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize Margaret Ronda of Portland, Oregon, won the 2009 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize for her collection Personification. She received $1,500, and her collection will be published by Saturnalia Books. Carl Phillips judged. The annual prize is given for a book-length poetry collection. The next deadline is March 31, 2010. Saturnalia Books, Poetry Prize, 105 Woodside Road, Ardmore, PA 19003. Henry Israeli, Publisher. www.saturnaliabooks.com

IU Creative Writing Program Among the Top in the Nation Indiana University's Creative Writing Program in the English Department ranks #12 in the nation, according to Poets and Writers magazine, one of the two main professional journals for writers. IU's Creative Writing beats out such illustrious programs as Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and University of Houston. The ranking is a recognition of the program's long tradition of commitment to quality and to nurturing some of the most talented young writers from America and abroad. Jonathan Elmer, Chair of the English Department, said, "We can all be proud of this wonderful program and the talented writers, teachers, and students in it." "We are very pleased with this news," said Samrat Upadhyay, Director of Creative Writing. "We've always known that our program provides a rigorous and supportive environment for writers to develop their craft, to grow as thinkers and teachers, and that our graduates go on to publish well and do wonderful work all over the country. This honor confirms our dedication to our students and to the art of writing, and validates the wonderful community we have here."

Keith Leonard in Best New Poets 2009 Congratulations to Keith Leonard, first-year poet, for getting his poem in Best New Poets 2009! Best New Poets is an annual anthology of 50 poems from emerging writers. The 2009 guest editor is Kim Addonizio.

Creative in Kathmandu: A Report with Photos! From Samrat Upadhyay, Director, Creative Writing Program: Last spring, the College Arts and Humanities Institute (CAHI) awarded me a grant to take with me two MFA students to Nepal, my home country, for a 15-day cultural/literary trip. Click here to view PHOTOS of the trip. Titled, “The Writer in the World: Cultural Space and Displacement,” the project’s aim was to enable a shift in cultural location that would trigger perceptual changes, which would in turn stimulate creativity. The two-week displacement, I hoped, would transform my students’ writing by forcing it to engage with a broader social and political sphere, and that it would deepen their sense of being writers of the world. The two students, Magda Sokolowski and Andres Sanabria, were chosen through a competitive process. They arrived in Kathmandu on July 1 to a jam-packed itinerary that included, among other things, cultural tours of Kathmandu Valley’s three ancient cities—Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur; journey to the resort town of Pokhara, with a side-trek to the Annapurna area with its glorious mountains; dinner at my mother Shanta Sharma’s home in the outskirts of Kathmandu; and observation of and participation in religious ceremonies performed by my mother-in-law Jayanti Lamsal at Kathmandu Ganesh temple and at her home. Magda and Andres also participated in a variety of literary activities. They conducted individual workshops for 8th-10th grade students at Malpi International School, offering critiques to the students on their poems and stories. Most of these students had never experienced a workshop before, and they expressed their deep appreciation for this opportunity. Magda and Andres spent one night at Malpi International, staying in its dorm rooms and interacting with the students. A few days later, they also participated in an award ceremony at Malpi, where they handed out certificates to students of all grade level. The two MFAers also didn’t hesitate to provide their autographs to the students—on books that I had authored! On another day, we visited an impoverished city school, Kanya Mandir, the first all-girls school of the country. We interacted with the students, and Magda and Andres (and my daughter Shahzadi) gave the students a good sense of student life in America. The three of us also participated on a panel on Creative Writing moderated by a celebrated Nepali writer in English, Sushma Joshi. The event, organized by Fine Print Book Club, was well-attended, with several reporters in the audience—and the conversation was stimulating. The day before they left Nepal, Magda and Andres gave a reading, along with me, at Quixote’s Cove bookstore in Kathmandu, an event that was covered by the national daily, The Himalayan Times. What was the experience like for Magda and Andres? Please read their reports below (Magda’s report is an excerpt from a travel essay, “Congratulations on Your Golden Life,” forthcoming in READ literary magazine based in Kathmandu). Andres Sanabria: Among the many beautiful experiences I had in Nepal—walking through the traffic choked streets of the capital; shopping for crafts in Thamel; observing a Hindu puja with a local family; trekking to an isolated village in the Annapurna conservation area; visiting ancient durbar squares in Patan, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur—the most rewarding for me was the opportunity to work with the young writers at the Malpi International School. At the school, I led six individual workshops with some very eager writers whose own work and cultural perspectives were remarkable for their differences from my own but more so for their unexpected similarities. I left the students keenly aware of the universality of the writer’s experiences, the urgent desire to make sense of our environment whatever it may be. I feel rejuvenated by the whole experience and am now thinking about my work in terms of its universalities. Magda Sokolowski As much as I wanted to go to Nepal under the guise of mental hygiene, stripping my brain of all desires, expectations and certainties, I knew I had to go with at least one or two questions in order to be true to the purpose of the fellowship, which was to explore the nature of the “writer in exile.” Or how one’s writing changes when uprooted and dislocated to another culture, another geographic place. How, I wondered, would poetic and linguistic meaning change as a result of being in Nepal? How would being culturally integrated in Nepal impact the experience of language and the experiences that language affords? Or would I even think about language while there—the very thing that my mind had been most consumed by for the last two years? The opportunity to balance precariously between the two cultures of Nepal and the US, even if for a brief moment, to stand at the intersection of two different ways of perceiving the world from two unique vantage points, truly excited me. I recalled what Salman Rushdie said in his essay “Imaginary Homelands.” “The possibilities” he writes “that exist for new perspectives as a result of the vantage point at intersections of culture, identity and place are infinite.” Infinite possibilities, infinite perspectives? I was totally psyched. I’d always believed that art in general, and especially poetry, tend to free us from the automatism of perception and when joined with the experience of negotiating new spaces, the possibilities for language become truly astounding. And this is precisely what I went looking for as I headed for Nepal—freedom from the autonomy of perception. What would such an experience look and feel like? And more interestingly, how would it impact my poetic expression? It wasn’t difficult to be immediately consumed by Nepal. From the moment Samrat, Andres and I left the airport and whizzed through the streets of Kathmandu during the morning rush of cars, buses, motorbikes, pedestrians and stray dogs, all of my senses amalgamated into a synaesthetic kaleidoscope and remained that way for the entire trip. “Perception is possibility” writes the ecologist and philosopher David Abram. Meaning that perception is the possibility of true, direct participation and this type of direct sensory participation allows for a new understanding of the world. Echoing what Abram writes about in his excellent book “The Spell of the Sensuous” (which I’d brought along on the trip), being in Nepal for me was a phenomenological experience. In Nepal, I felt like I was returning to the things themselves. When I was able to shed my expectations, perceived ideas and notions, I entered Abram’s world of “the flesh of language” or as phenomenology suggests—the fundamental experience of living. In this type of experience, even language seems to subside while the body’s senses open up to a full range of perceptual opportunities, like those I experienced in Nepal. There, I found the air to be a thick and textured presence filled with both visible and invisible tactile, olfactory, and audible influences. Whether in Kathmandu where burning incense combines with the aromas of roasting meats, honey-glazed pastries and citrus fruits for trade in the open markets, the stench of organic refuse rotting in the ravines punctuated by the black exhaust of too many cars on narrow dirt roadways, the hot-sour smell of fresh blood from the sacrificial cremation of a small black goat swirling with the warm monsoon rain, and the waxy-smoke odor of a million candles burning during the ceremonial puja for the Hindu god Ganesh; or in the small high mountain towns, where the wind carries the whiffs of countless wildflowers alongside the ripe pungency of millet and corn, and of the newly turned earth outside the villages where the fragrant dung of yaks dries in round patties to be used later as household fuel. From the beginning, I was taken by the smells of Nepal and the sounds too: the cacophonous honking and braking of cars on a jam-packed street, the tantric orchestra of chanting monks, singing bowls and prayer bells alongside the flapping of prayer flags as the high-mountain winds poured over the passes, the rivers that gushed, and the meals that sizzled in the open-market air. It’s become a cliché by now, how developing countries surpass developed ones in terms of the sensory-overload they provide, but that’s precisely what I experienced in Nepal, sensory overload in the fullest sense of the word. And how strange that my impulse during the trip was to actually limit thinking as well as limit thinking about language. I knew that the time for creating work and writing poetry would come, but what was important while in Nepal, was to simply be, and “to take it as it comes,” which was exactly the advice we’d gotten from Samrat before leaving. So I surrendered to experience and all it afforded: witnessing the sacrifice of a small black goat at a temple high on a hillside outside of Kathmandu; alerting to the sudden squawk of a monkey as it chewed on the remainder of an empty juice container along the Bagmati River; partaking in an ancient ceremony performed at one of Kathmandu's oldest Ganesh Temples and stirred the offering candle with the tip of sugar cane; eating with my hand a delicious plateful of Nepali food on a rooftop overlooking the entire valley and threw rice into a fire as an offering to the Hindu Gods; bartering bartered with a shopkeeper over an antique Ceremonial mask; and dodging cars, bikes, rickshaws as the sun set over the city, turning it into dark alleyways punctuated with the intermittent lights of braking cars. “It's like a dance,” I said to Andres, “the way the cars and bikes and people navigate these ancient alleyways ... a beautifully orchestrated dance.” All of this reminded me of something that one of my favorite poets William Stafford quotes Robert Frost as having said. “A conscientious interest in poetry,” Stafford and Frost both claim, “is worse than no interest at all,” meaning, of course, that writing is not about intention, but rather about possibility and the primacy of feeling. Indeed, “intention endangers creation,” Stafford wrote. In other words, a writer can’t plan to elicit creative results, but most find them by willingly entering “an area of possible encounter.” Stafford believed that to have in mind patterns other than those dictated by immediate experience is to violate the process that a writer must depend on. And that’s exactly what it was like, what it became for me—the experience in Nepal with all of its amazing sites, sounds and smells was like entering Stafford’s “area of possible encounter.” While in Nepal, as a temporarily “exiled writer,” I simply needed to listen while there in order to measure the pulse of one of the most beautiful places in the world. Language, and poetry, I realized, would come later—after the lived experience itself.

Joint Degree in Creative Writing and African American and African Diaspora Studies launched MA/MFA in Creative Writing and African American and African Diaspora Studies Starting 2008, we are proud to offer a joint MA/MFA degree in Creative Writing and African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAADS), the first in the nation. The four-year degree program is a result of keen interest shown by many of our students in combining their pursuit of imaginative writing with traditional academic scholarship related to the African and African American experience. It allows students to synthesize critical studies of the African diaspora, especially in literature, with creative and original works of poetry and prose. Students admitted to the dual degree would have access to the faculty and resources of a top notch creative writing program and a strong multidisciplinary department. The dual degree is a triumphant realization of the mission of diversity shared by the Creative Writing Program, the Department of AAADS, and Indiana University. Course requirements and sequence for the Joint MA/MFA Degree The total number of required credit hours is 68, with 16 of those hours as thesis credits and the Field Study Seminar. At least 52 credit hours of the degree requirements must be completed in residence (48 of the required 52 residential hours have to completed in the MFA program by students entering this dual degree process from creative writing). Semester One W611 Writing Fiction I-II (4 hours) or W613 Writing Poetry I-II (4 hours) W554 Teaching Creative Writing (2 hours) A500 Introduction to African American and African Diaspora Studies Part I (4 hours) or A503 Introduction to African American and African Diaspora Studies Part II (3 hours) Semester Two W612 Writing Fiction I-II (4 hours) or W614 Writing Poetry I-II (4 hours) W664 Topics in Current Literature (4 hours) or W680 Theory and Craft of Writing (4 hours) A580 Recent Black American Writing (3 hours) or L655 American Literature and Culture 1900-1945 (4 hours) or L680 Theory and Craft of Writing (4 hours) or other appropriate 600-level course Semester Three W611 Writing Fiction I-II (4 hours) or W613 Writing Poetry (4 hours) W501 Teaching Composition (2 hours) A680 Traditions in the African American Novel (3 hours) or A679 Contemporary Black Poetry (3 hours) or English 600-level (4 hours) Semester Four W612 or W614 (writing workshops) (4 hours) A501 Harlem Renaissance (4 hours) A586 Black Feminist Perspectives (3 hours) or appropriate 500- or 600-level course Semester Five C561 African Literary Traditions (4 hours) or substitution in specifically African studies literature course or C691 African American Intellectual Traditions (4 hours) or one of the following pro-seminars: A691 Cultural and Historical Studies in AAADS, A692 Literature in AAADS, A693 Social and Behavioral Sciences in AAADS, or A694 The Arts in AAADS (3 hours) Semester Six A690 Core Readings (4 hours) or A691 Cultural and Historical Studies in AAADS (3 hours) or A692 Literature in AAADS (3 hours) or A693 Social and Behavioral Sciences in AAADS (3 hours) A590 Black Atlantic (4 hours) Semester Seven W699 MFA Thesis Hours (4 hours) A698 Field Study Seminar (4 hours) Semester Eight W699 MFA Thesis Hours (4 hours) A698 Field Study Seminar (4 hours) For more information, please contact Samrat Upadhyay, Creative Writing Program Director at supadhya@indiana.edu

Faculty Maura Stanton publishes Immortal Sofa Read an interview of Maura about her new book here.

Cathy Bowman publishes The Plath Cabinet Congratulations to Cathy Bowman on her new collection of poetry, The Plath Cabinet.

MFA Faculty Alyce Miller's Water a finalist in the Paterson Prize MFA Faculty Alyce Miller's collection of stories, WATER, is a finalist in the Paterson Prize. The book also won The The Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction from Sarabande Books in 2007

MFA Faculty, Samrat Upadhyay, winner of the 10th annual Asian American Literary Award Congratulations to Samrat Upadhyay for winning the Asian American Literary Award in Fiction, for his book The Royal Ghosts.

Poet, Ross Gay, joins the M.F.A. Program at Indiana University Poet, Ross Gay, joins the M.F.A. Program at Indiana University. Ross Gay is the author of the collection Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Harvard Review, Columbia: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, among other places. He teaches at Indiana University and in the low-residency program at New England College. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a demolition man.