Fall 2010 Emerging Writer Fellows Revisited: Bios

Last week I posted the announcement for our Fall 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship winners and finalists. Today I want to expand that to include the bios of all the winners. The Emerging Writer Fellowships are awarded to writers who have published up to 2 book-length works of prose and up to three book-length works of poetry. During the blind application process, The Writer's Center received dozens of submissions from emerging writers in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. There were six recipients. The fellows will headline, with musical guests to be determined by curators Chad Clark (Beauty Pill) and Matt Byars (The Caribbean), these upcoming Story/Stereo events:

Friday, September 3, 8:00 P.M.


Aryn Kyle (fiction: Boys and Girls Like You and Me)

Allison Benis White (poetry: Self-Portrait with Crayon)

Friday, October 8, 8:00 P.M.

Jenny Browne (poetry: The Second Reason)

Debra Gwartney (nonfiction: Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters)

Friday, November 5, 8:00 P.M.

Doreen Baingana (fiction: Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe)

Alison Pelegrin (poetry: Big Muddy River of Stars)

Allison Benis White is the author of Self-Portrait with Crayon, winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, and Pleiades. Her honors include the Indiana Review Poetry Prize, the Bernice Slote Award from Prairie Schooner, and a Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers. She recently completed a second manuscript, “Small Porcelain Head,” which received the James D. Phelan award for a work-in-progress from the San Francisco Foundation. She teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Visit her Web site.

Jenny Browne is the author of two collections, At Once and The Second Reason, both from the University of Tampa Press. Poems from her new manuscript, “Some Studies for the Monster,” have been recently published, or are forthcoming from AGNI, American Poetry Review, Bat City Review, Gulf Coast, and Measure. A former James Michener Fellow in Poetry at the University of Texas-Austin, she lives in downtown San Antonio and teaches at Trinity University. Visit her Web site.

The recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, Alison Pelegrin is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Big Muddy River of Stars. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and The Writer's Almanac. At present she teaches English at Southeastern Louisiana University. Learn about her book online.

Doreen Baingana is the author of Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe, which won an AWP Short Fiction Award and a Commonwealth Prize. She has also won the Washington Independent Writers Fiction Prize and was nominated twice for the Caine Prize for African Writing. Her stories and essays have appeared in journals such as Glimmer Train, Chelsea, African American Review, Callaloo, The Guardian, UK, Chimurenga, and Kwani. She has an M.F.A from the University of Maryland and has taught creative writing as a Writer-in-Residence at the University of Maryland, The Writer’s Center, the SLS/Kwani literary festivals in Kenya, and with FEMRITE in Uganda. Listen to her discuss Tropical Fish on NPR.

Aryn Kyle is the author of the novel The God of Animals and the short story collection Boys and Girls Like You and Me. Her work as appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Best American Short Stories 2007, Best New American Voices 2005, and elsewhere, and has been translated into fifteen languages. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award, an American Library Association Alex Award, and a National Magazine Award in fiction. She lives in New York City. Visit her Web site.

Debra Gwartney is the author of Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and named a best book of the year by The Oregonian and Pacific Northwest Booksellers. She is co-editor, with her husband Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. She lives in western Oregon and teaches at Pacific University. Visit her Web site.

Our call for submissions for our Spring 2011 Emerging Writer Fellowships are now open. For more information, visit The Writer's Center's Web site here.