EP/UWB Contest 2019 Winners


 

Essay Press / University of Washington Bothell MFA Book Contest

 

Essay Press and the University of Washington Bothell’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Poetics are happy to announce the winners of our 2019 book contest: Ching-In Chen has selected Poem That Never Ends by Silvina López Medin and Jill Magi has selected Groundswell by Yanara Friedland!

 

Poem That Never Ends by SILVINA LÓPEZ MEDIN

Photo credit: Martín Sonzogni

Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York. She is the author of four books of poetry: La noche de los bueyes (Madrid, 1999), which won the Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize, Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar (Buenos Aires, 2014), 62 brazadas (Buenos Aires, 2015), and Excursion (Buenos Aires, forthcoming 2020). Excursion was selected by Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the 2019 Oversound Chapbook Prize (Oversound, 2020). Her play Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo, 2008) was granted the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (2015) into Spanish. Her poems and other pieces have appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, Poetry Daily, and MoMA/post, among others. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and is an editor at Ugly Duckling Presse.

 
 

Groundswell by YANARA FRIEDLAND

Photo credit: Benjamin M Johnson

Yanara Friedland is a writer and translator born in Berlin. Her first book Uncountry: A Mythology was the winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Fiction award and is forthcoming in German translation with Mattes & Seitz. She is the recipient of research grants from the DAAD and Arizona Commission on the Arts, supporting her poetic chorography of walls and borders Groundswell. Recent work has appeared in Western Humanities Review, Asymptote, and Matters of Feminist Practice. She is Assistant Professor at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies and runs MUTTER COURAGE, an occasional reading series in Bellingham, WA. She is currently working on a book on sleeplessness.
 

EDITORS’ SELECTION

The Essay Press editors have also selected Valerie Hsiung’s hummingbird et partygirl for publication.

 

FINALISTS

Jessica Bozek, Grief Machine: A Diary
Thom Donovan, Left Melancholy: Parts 1 & 2
Leora Fridman, FASCI/NATION
Kristen Gallagher, Six Years in Florida, A Diary
Andrew Joron, The Poetics of Complexity
Carrie Lorig, Collection / Agency
Amanda Montei, fur and velvet, underclothing
Noah Eli Gordon, An Index to Noah Eli Gordon’s Next 135 Works
Kylan Rice, Incryptions
A. Christopher Schmidt with B. Wesley Macedo, The Elizabeth Course: Site Writings in Color
Dennis James Sweeney, You’re the Woods Too
Steffan Triplett, Inclement

 

ABOUT EP / THE UWB MFA

 

Essay Press is dedicated to publishing artful, innovative and culturally relevant prose that extends or challenges the formal protocols of nonfiction.
 
University of Washington Bothell’s MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics is unique for its emphasis on poetics, encouraging a cross-genre and multi-media curriculum, bringing together nationally and internationally renowned faculty including visual artists and creative writers, and giving students the freedom to pursue their second year as residency or non-residency students, or a hybrid of both.
 
The EP/UWB MFA Book Contest publishes manuscripts that extend or challenge the formal possibilities of prose, including but not limited to: lyric essays and prose poems or poetics; experimental biography and autobiography; innovative approaches to journalism, interdisciplinary historiography, criticism, scholarship and philosophy. Simultaneous submissions, multiple submissions, collaborative manuscripts, digital and hybridized text/art manuscripts are all welcome. The contest winners will receive book publication by Essay Press, and travel expenses for invited readings on the Bothell campus and in downtown Seattle.