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Texas Review Press Announces Prize Winners
Feb. 22, 2013
SHSU Media Contact: Jennifer Gauntt, Paul Ruffin,
Chris Foster
Texas Review Press, housed in Sam Houston State University’s Department of English, has announced the winners of its four international competitions and its ongoing Southern Breakthrough poetry competition.
The 2012 international competition winners include: Tim Parrish, The George Garret Fiction Prize; Jeff Worley, the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize; Adam Berlin, the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize; and David Lanier, the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. Erin Ganaway has been selected as the Southern Breakthrough poetry competition winner.
The George Garret Fiction Prize-winning novel by Parrish, The Jumper, is about an orphan who grows up on a ranch in west Texas and is summoned to Baton Rouge to discover his past and his family history.
A native of Baton Rouge, La., Parish currently lives and teaches in New Haven, Conn., as a professor of fiction writing in both the Master of Fine Arts and undergraduate fiction-writing programs at Southern Connecticut State University.
The X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize was awarded to Worley, of Kentucky, for his manuscript entitled A Little Luck, which explores moments in the author’s childhood.
Set at Cave Run Lake in Appalachian Kentucky and in urban Kentucky, the poems in the collection run the gamut from playful tones to the more somber.
A decorated poet, Worley’s work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and journals. He has also won prizes for Kentucky Book of the Year (poetry), the Mid-List Press First-Book Poetry Prize and the Society of Midland Authors Literary Competition.
Worley is now retired from the University of Kentucky and resides in Lexington.
The Clay Reynolds Novella Prize was presented to Berlin, of New York, for his novella Both Members of This Club. A story of friendship and ambition set against the world of boxing, a world where truths are exposed and physical limits tested, the story follows Billy Carlyle as he begins losing in this world of boxing and his friends and family attempt to persuade him to leave the ring.
Berlin has published two novels: Headlock (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) and Belmondo, which has won the Publishing Triangle’s Ferro-Grumley award.
He currently teaches writing at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and also co-edits J Journal: New Writing on Justice.
Lanier’s collection of poetry, Lost & Found, selected for the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize, examines growing up in the rural southeast during the 1960s and losing the evidence of his growing world through death and environment of his youth. His poetry attempts not only to revisit what has been lost, but also to find new emotional meaning and the significance of those people and things around him.
The New Mexico resident was born and raised in North Carolina, and he received his MFA from Warren Wilson College and his bachelor’s and doctor of medicine degrees from University of North Carolina.
Lanier has been on staff with the Georgetown University School of Medicine and later worked in the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.
His poems have been published in several journals and magazines, including Poetry, Poet Lore, and Southern Poetry Review.
Finally, the Southern Poetry Breakthrough Series winner, Erin Ganaway, of Atlanta, was recognized for her collection of poetry called The Waiting Girl. The competition is limited to full-length collections of poetry by Southern poets who have yet to publish a full-length collection.
Ganaway’s The Waiting Girl investigates landscapes, both interior and exterior, as they apply to identity, exploring bipolar disorder, melancholia and mania as a means of raising awareness of what she feels are largely misunderstood states of being.
Ganaway’s work has been featured in The Southern Poetry Anthology (Texas Review Press), The New York Quarterly, The Texas Review and several other anthologies and journals.
All of the winning books will be released in both printed and eBook form by Texas Review Press in 2013.
More details are forthcoming on the TRP website at http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/.
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