2008 Iowa Poetry Prize Winners Announced Winning Collections to Be Published in Spring 2009

Andrew Michael Roberts of Seattle, Washington, and Zach Savich of Leonardtown, Maryland, have been named 2008 recipients of the prestigious Iowa Poetry Prize. Roberts is being honored for his debut collection something has to happen next. Savich’s award-winning collection, Full Catastrophe Living, is also a debut. Both collections will be published in April 2009 by the University of Iowa Press.

The poems in something has to happen next, if given the chance, might peer down inquisitively from a great height; they speak of quietness, namelessness, the reachlessness of love, the fortune of animals and their silence, apocalypse, abandonment, beginnings and endings. Working with brevity and compression, Roberts first imagines “how small I could go with a poem and still maintain some sort of emotional or imagistic center.” Then, released from this limitation, the rest of his poems expand to fill a world with imagery, emotion, and sound.

What Roberts calls “simply a book of small poems” was conceived out of his obsessions with time and catastrophe and love and abandonment—what is always possible, almost attained, but lost at the last minute. When something ends or when everything ends, something else must always happen next—what will it be, and who will be there to name and love and destroy it?

Andrew Michael Roberts received a BA in education from Washington State University, a BA in English from Portland State University, and an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where he was a Juniper Fellow and received the distinguished teaching award. He is currently Youth Art Works Manager at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his work has been published in such journals as Tin House, the Iowa Review, LIT, Gulf Coast, the Cincinnati Review, the Colorado Review, and Fugue. He is the author of two chapbooks, Give Up (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2006) and Dear Wild Abandon, which won the Poetry Society of America National Chapbook Award in 2007 and was published by the society in 2008.

Merging the spirits of Don Quixote, Shakespearean fools, Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, James Merrill, and the Marx Brothers, Zach Savich's collection does more than showcase the innovative fluency of its roving forms and moods: these poetic hybrids are not hothouse blossoms but minotaurs. With ebullient intelligence and high-stakes insistence on the panic, lust, and suffering of the sensual world, Full Catastrophe Living uses the self as an instrument to investigate art, love, and the hardest honesty. In producing “a planetarium, the space inside equivalent to all around,” this exuberant debut seeks to make the grass seem more like grass, not “because of a lived loss of sense, but because of how much grass even / Imagined grass around us is.”

In meditations, songs, slapstick sequences, sonnets, narratives, and tightly carved fragments, Savich explores the conflicts between romance and reality, between inventing a new world and staying true to this one. His poetry, motivated by the steady underrumble of necessity, is like a shoebox diorama that catches a solar eclipse: “Now the cardboard orange juice carton dissolves in rain. / You: I could never say tread without hearing tremble.” Relishing both traditional and experimental poetics, Savich’s poems take refreshing, ecumenical risks to show the “strange grace / of bells that ring with a rag’s polishing.” Like a Fourth of July band conductor guiding planes to land, their wit alters what’s real. This book will change how readers think about poetry, language’s expressive capacity, and the robust world around us.

Zach Savich was born in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1982. He received a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop; he is currently in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst, where he is a teaching assistant. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals, including the Colorado Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, jubilat, Court Green, and the Denver Quarterly. He is an editor at Thermos Magazine.

Awarded annually by the University of Iowa Press, the Iowa Poetry Prize is one of the leading national poetry awards. The acclaimed competition is open to new as well as established poets. Recent winners of the prize include Sunday Houses the Sunday House by Elizabeth Hughey, American Spikenard by Sara Vap, Lug Your Careless Body Out of the Careful Dusk by Joshua Marie Wilkinson, and Raw Goods Inventory by Emily Rosko.

Kim Marra Awarded NYU’S Joe A. Callaway Prize for Best Book on Drama or Theatre

Kim Marra is the winner of the 2008 Joe A. Callaway Prize for the best book on drama or theatre presented by New York University’s Department of English. Marra wins the award for Strange Duets: Impresarios and Actresses in the American Theatre, 1865-1914, published in 2006.

The book was selected from a large number of distinguished works on dramatic literature, performance theory, and theatre history. The three-member panel of judges, chaired by Una Chaudhuri, professor of English and drama at NYU, characterized Strange Duets as “an exceptionally original contribution to our understanding of a crucial period of American theatre history. An expansively conceptualized and deeply researched study of the complex cultural forces—including what in recent decades came to be called 'identity politics'—that shaped the foundations of American show business, this book tells its important story through richly detailed and riveting accounts of the lives and relationships of some of the most legendary directors, impresarios and actors of early American theatre. Strange Duets is a work of luminous imagination and superb scholarship.”

The prize was established by Joe A. Callaway, an actor, drama lecturer, and supporter of theatrical causes. It is awarded biennially and carries a cash award of $9,000.

In Strange Duets Marra combines methods of cultural, gender, and sexuality studies with theatre history to explore the vexed mutual dependency between these status-seeking Svengalis and their alternately willing and resistant leading ladies. She illuminates how their on- and off-stage performances, highly charged in this Darwinian era with “racial” as well as gender, sexual, and class dynamics, tapped into the contradictory fantasies and aspirations of their audiences. Played out against a backdrop of enormous cultural and institutional transformation, the volatile romance of Augustin Daly and Ada Rehan, closeted homosexuality of Charles Frohman and Maude Adams, and carnal expiations of David Belasco and Mrs. Leslie Carter produced strange duets indeed.

Kim Marra is a professor of theatre history and chair of the American Studies department at the University of Iowa. She coedited Passing Performances: Queer Readings of Leading Players in American Theater History, Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theater History, and The Gay and Lesbian Theatrical Legacy: A Biographical Dictionary of Major Figures of the American Stage in the Pre-Stonewall Era.

Maggie Nelson’s Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions Wins the 2008 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce Maggie Nelson as the recipient of the tenth annual Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship. Nelson, a poet, memoirist, literary critic, and scholar who teaches in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts, receives this year’s award for her book Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions, published in 2007.

In this whip-smart study, Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

With contagious enthusiasm, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions ranges widely and covers collaborations between poets and painters in the 1950s and 1960s; the complex role played by the “true abstraction” of the feminine in the work of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler; the intricate weave of verbal and visual arts throughout the postwar period, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop to Conceptualism to feminist and queer performance art; and the unfolding, diverse careers of Mayer, Notley, and Myles from the 1970s to the present. Along the way, Nelson considers provocative questions of anonymity and publicity, the solitary and the communal, the enduring and the ephemeral, domesticity, boredom, sex, and politics.

By asking us to rethink the ways in which we conceptualize “schools” and “avant-gardes” and eventually drawing our attention to larger, compelling questions about how and why we read—and how gender and sexuality inform that reading in the first place—Nelson not only fills an important gap in the history of American poetry and art but also gives an inspired performance of the kind of lively, audacious, and personally committed criticism that befits her subject.

The Glasscock Book Prize, first awarded in 1999, originated by the Texas A&M Center for Humanities Research, was permanently endowed in December 2000 by Melbern G. Glasscock '59 and his wife Susanne M. Glasscock, for whom the prize is now named.

Interview with Cornelia F. Mutel

Interview with Cornelia Mutel, author of The Emerald Horizon: The History of Nature in Iowa

Q: In the course of your research, what one fact did you find about the natural history of Iowa that surprised you?

A: The fact that in addition to our rare natives, even many of our common species (e.g. blue jays, bullsnakes) are slowly declining – an event that signals that Iowa’s natural systems are being pushed to the breaking point. My gut-level depression from this knowledge was fortunately counteracted by seeing restored prairies and oak woodlands that are increasing in diversity, health, and integrity, where native species are increasing. Witnessing nature’s resilience, its willingness to return to Iowa’s overworked landscape, was perhaps my biggest surprise and joy.

Q: What one item about the natural history of Iowa would you most like people to know about?
           
A: That restoring the health and integrity of native communities is both possible and necessary. Native species and communities provide ecological services that we cannot survive without. They supply pollinators of flowers and crops and natural pest controls. They cleanse water and air, build and hold soil, moderate weather extremes, and provide many more benefits – sustainably and at no cost. Thus restoring native diversity and our natural landscape will not only bring joy and peace to the heart, it will also foster Iowa’s environmental quality and our economy.

Q: The Iowa River was recently named one of the most endangered waterways in America. Why is that and what can Iowans do to help rectify that?
           
A: Prior to Euroamerican settlement, Iowa’s waters ran crystalline clear. The plowing of the tallgrass prairie (which used to cover 80% of Iowa) removed the dense perennial vegetation and complex root systems that filtered precipitation and released water slowly into swales and creeks. Sediment (and, later, agricultural chemicals) then started to wash over the land surface, directly into streams. Returning health to our waterways depends on restoring the upland watersheds – getting a portion of the corn and soybean croplands (which now cover 2/3 of Iowa) back into healthy, preferably native, perennial vegetation. 

Q: What is the impact of ethanol production on the ecosystem of Iowa? As so much of Iowa's economy is agriculturally based, how do we reach a happy medium between this potential economic boon and its ecological fallout?
           
A: If ethanol production increases the amount of Iowa’s land in cornfields and leads to the plowing of perennial set-aside lands (such as CRP plantings), it will increase water pollution and erosion and cause other environmental problems. Long-term environmental costs will likely exceed short-term economic gains. However, if techniques can be developed to produce ethanol from prairie plantings, this could increase the expanse of Iowa’s native perennial vegetation and improve our environment in multiple ways.

Q: What do you think of the "greening" of America? Most people are now cognizant of the basics (such as recycling, using mass transit or carpooling, organic farming) but what else can the average American do to make a difference? What's the next step, as it were?
           
A: Most types of environmental activism are to be applauded. But I think that people only work for what they know and love, deep in their guts. Thus we need to encourage more Iowans, and especially our children, to fall in love with nature: to spend time outside where they can see and take joy in the returning of neotropical migrants each spring, and celebrate the blooming of native wildflowers in restored oak woodlands, and nurse patches of prairie plants back to health. Recognizing these native species requires a bit of education. I hope that The Emerald Horizon will help provide that education to a broad, diverse audience.

Q: What is your hope and vision for the future of the environment of the Midwest and specifically Iowa? How can it be achieved? Conversely, what will happen to Iowa if we aren't willing to change?
           
A: I envision an Iowa where natural communities once again intergrade our working landscape throughout the state – and native species thrive and spread, diversifying and beautifying the landscape and fostering environmental health and stability. This is possible only through the commitment of Iowans and the dedication and support of our government.  Without that commitment, we will continue to lose the species that have provided Iowa with its rich agricultural soils and culture – and we will suffer in multiple ways from that loss.

Tied to the Great Packing Machine Wins the 2008 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking is the winner of the 2008 Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award. This annual award, presented by the State Historical Society of Iowa, recognizes the book judged as the most significant book on Iowa history published during the preceding year. It is named in honor of Benjamin F. Shambaugh, for forty years the superintendent of the State Historical Society of Iowa, professor of political science at the University of Iowa, and one of the founders of the “new social science” at the turn of the century.

Ambitious in its historical scope and its broad range of topics, Tied to the Great Packing Machine tells the dramatic story of meatpacking’s enormous effects on the economics, culture, and environment of the Midwest over the past century and a half. Wilson Warren situates the history of the industry in both its urban and its rural settings—moving from the huge stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City to today’s smaller meatpacking communities—and thus presents a complete portrayal of meatpacking’s place within the larger agro-industrial landscape.

Writing from the vantage point of twenty-five years of extensive research, Warren analyzes the evolution of the packing industry from its early period, dominated by the big terminal markets, through the development of new marketing and technical innovations that transformed the ways animals were gathered, slaughtered, and processed and the final products were distributed. In addition, he concentrates on such cultural impacts as ethnic and racial variations, labor unions, gender issues, and changes in Americans’ attitudes toward the ethics of animal slaughter and patterns of meat consumption and such environmental problems as site-point pollution and microbe contamination, ending with a stimulating discussion of the future of American meatpacking.

Providing an excellent and well-referenced analysis within a regional and temporal framework that ensures a fresh perspective, Tied to the Great Packing Machine is a dynamic narrative that contributes to a fuller understanding of the historical context and contemporary concerns of an extremely important industry.

Wilson Warren is associate professor of history at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. A native of Ottumwa, Iowa, he has published several articles and one previous book on meatpacking, Struggling with “Iowa’s Pride”: Labor Relations, Unionism, and Politics in the Rural Midwest since 1877 (Iowa, 2000). He is also the coauthor of Ottumwa and Teaching History in the Digital Classroom.

Haunted by Waters Named the National
Council on Public History Best Book

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that Haunted by Waters: A Journey through Race and Place in the American West by Robert T. Hayashi has been selected as the winner of the 2008 National Council on Public History Book Award for the best work published about or growing out of public history. Public history involves historical research, analysis, and presentation, with some degree of application to the needs of contemporary life.

As an easterner, researcher, angler, and third-generation Japanese American traveling across the contemporary Idaho landscape—where his grandfather died during internment during World War II—Hayashi reconstructs a landscape that lured emigrants of all races at the same time its ruling forces were developing cultural processes that excluded nonwhites. Throughout each convincing and compelling chapter, he searches for the stories of dispossessed minorities as patiently as he searches for trout.

Using a wide range of materials that include memoirs, oral interviews, poetry, legal cases, letters, government documents, and even road signs, Hayashi illustrates how Thomas Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian, all-white, and democratic West affected the Gem State’s Nez Perce, Chinese, Shoshone, Mormon, and particularly Japanese residents. Starting at the site of the Corps of Discovery’s journey into Idaho, he details the ideological, aesthetic, and material manifestations of these intertwined notions of race and place. As he fly-fishes Idaho’s fabled rivers and visits its historical sites and museums, Hayashi reads the contemporary landscape in light of this evolution.

The NCPH is a membership association dedicated to making the past useful in the present and to encouraging collaboration between historians and their publics. They work to establish professional standards, ethics, and best practices; provide professional development opportunities; recognize excellence in a diverse range of public history activities; foster networking and a sense of community among public history practitioners; and support history education.

Additional Praise:
“Luminous as Idaho’s fabled trout streams, Haunted by Waters recounts how racialized minorities, including native peoples, Hawaiians, Chinese, and Japanese, transformed spaces into places in the physical and social landscape of the American West. And in the course of this journey, we come to discover a river to ourselves.”—Gary Y. Okihiro, Columbia University

“‘It is not fly-fishing if you are not seeking answers to questions,’ says Norman Maclean’s father in A River Runs through It, and as a scholar and fly-fisherman Robert Hayashi shows us how researching and writing about his Japanese American ancestry in the American West are intimately connected to his love of fly-fishing western waters. The way the book culminates with the touching revelation of the author’s being ‘haunted by waters’ beautifully complicates that famous conclusion to A River Runs through It and makes us aware of how each of us sees the landscape through a unique personal, cultural, and historical lens and acts accordingly.”—Don Scheese, author, Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout’s Life in the River of No Return Wilderness

Robert T. Hayashi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Haunted by Waters is his first book.

The award will be presented at the Presidential Luncheon/Awards Ceremony/Business Meeting during the NCPH Annual Meeting at the Brown Hotel on Friday, April 11, in Louisville, KY.

2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award Winners Announced

The University of Iowa Press is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Awards. Glen Pourciau is the winner of the 2008 Iowa Short Fiction Award for his collection Invite. Molly McNett's One Dog Happy is the winner of the 2008 John Simmons Short Fiction Award. The recipients were selected by final judge Charles D’Ambrosio, author of The Dead Fish Museum and Orphans.

Glen Pourciau’s stories have won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize and the Brazos Bookstore Award for Best Short Story from the Texas Institute of Letters, and they have been cited in Best American Short Stories and nominated for Pushcart Prizes. He has published stories in such magazines as the New England Review, Ontario Review, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, and Quarterly West. He lives in Plano, Texas.

Intense inner and outer monologues resonate through the lives of Glen Pourciau’s characters. We hear the voice of a man who will not stop talking, the voice of a man who does not want to talk, the voice of a man stunned into silence by his sudden awareness of a desire he did not know he felt, and the voice of a man struggling to accept his imminent death.

Inhabiting an outwardly bland landscape that overlays internal questions and recurring confusion, the narrators of these ten intensely felt stories strive to understand their varied predicaments. Conflicts with neighbors arise, troubling memories return, suspicions and fears lead people into isolated corners as distances open up inside them and around them. And in those open spaces, the sometimes humorous, sometimes obsessive voices continue their quest. In the final story, “Deep Wilderness,” the voices seem to fragment as a family comes apart.

While his characters struggle to come to terms with their inner wilderness, Glen Pourciau’s spare, riveting voice maintains a constant presence. Invite is a debut collection that speaks volumes.
Molly McNett’s work has appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Brain Child magazine, the Missouri Review, Black Warrior Review, New England Review, New Letters, Crazyhorse, and Other Voices. She lives on a farm in northern Illinois with her husband and children.

In One Dog Happy, McNett couples laugh-out-loud dialogue and wry observation reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor with disquieting strains of dashed hope, troubled sexuality, and disillusionment. The adults in these stories can seem as hapless and helpless as the younger characters. Two neglected daughters use the language of clothes to cope with their parents’ divorce and their father’s mail-order bride. A young girl’s bizarre sexual fantasies help her gain control over the chaos of her family life. A gang of teenagers accuse a farmer of bestiality. A divorced father tries to create a pony-filled world that might appeal to his daughters. In the title story, Mr. Bob, the minister’s housesitter, loses a dog but finds someone to believe in. And in “Helping,” the darkest story in this amazing collection, Ruthie’s anger conquers her religious faith when she takes care of a severely disabled child.

We meet McNett’s endearing, often foolish characters at a point when their minds are open to manipulation by the people and events around them, and the conclusions they draw are heartbreaking: I am not allowed weakness; life treats people unequally; perhaps there is no God. Yet throughout they find quiet moments of possibility, courage, and a return to faith and comfort.

The short fiction awards are given to a first collection of fiction in English and are administered through the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The honors are national in scope and have been given since 1969. The John Simmons Short Fiction Award (named for the first director of the University of Iowa Press) was created in 1988 to complement the existing Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Recent winners include Whose World Is This? by Lee Montgomery, Desert Gothic by Don Waters, Permanent Visitors by Kevin Moffett, Things Kept, Things Left Behind by Jim Tomlinson, A Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space by Douglas Trevor, and This Day in History by Anthony Varallo.

Author Events

Douglas Bauer, Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home

Des Moines, Iowa

Thursday, November 6

7:00 PM

Des Moines Public Library

1000 Grand Avenue

515/283-4152

Dan Roche, Great Expectation: A Father's Diary

Skaneateles, New York

Saturday, November 8

TBA

"Local Author Day" at Creekside Books & Coffee

35 Fennell Street

315/685-0379

Glen Pourciau, Invite

Plano, Texas

Saturday, November 15

2:00 PM

Booksigning at Barnes & Noble

2201 Preston Road, Suite E

972/612-0999

Molly McNett, One Dog Happy

New York, New York

Sunday, November 16

7:00 PM

Reading at KGB Bar

85 East Fourth Street

212/505-3360

Robyn Schiff, Revolver

Iowa City, Iowa

Tuesday, November 18

7:00 PM

Reading at Prairie Lights Books

15 South Dubuque Street

319/337-2681

Glen Pourciau, Invite

Galveston, Texas

Saturday, November 29

6:00 PM

Reading and signing at Midsummer Books

2309 Mechanic Street

409/765-5930

John Isles, Inverse Sky

Berkeley, California

January 25, 2009

2:00 PM

Reading at Moe's Bookstore

2476 Telegraph Avenue

510/849-2087

John Isles, Inverse Sky

San Francisco, California

February 18, 2009

7:30 PM

Reading at City Lights Books

261 Columbus Ave

415/362-8193

Dan Roche, Great Expectation: A Father's Diary

Syracuse, New York

March 13, 2009

7:00 PM

Reading at the YMCA’s Downtown Writer’s Center

340 Montgomery Street

315/474-6851

John Isles, Inverse Sky

Portland, Oregon

April 16, 2009

2:00 PM

Reading at Lewis and Clarke College, Miller 105

0615 South West Palatine Hill Road

503/768-7405

John Isles, Inverse Sky

Portland, Oregon

April 16, 2009

7:30 PM

Reading at Marylhurst University

Location TBA

For more information or to schedule an event with one of our authors, please contact our associate marketing manager, Allison Thomas.