 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 collaborative book contest: of color by Katherine Agard and The War Requiem by Kaia Preus!
of color by KATHERINE AGARD
Photo credit: Gabriel Woodham Katherine Agard is an artist. Her interdisciplinary work is rooted in painting, performance, and writing. She holds an A.B. in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard and an MFA in Writing from UC-San Diego. She has received fellowships from Kimbilio, Lambda Literary, VONA/Voices, and Callaloo. Her writing can be found in Anmly, Black Warrior Review, Yes Femmes, PALM and forthcoming in Feminist Studies. She is a dual citizen of Trinidad and Tobago and of Ghana. She lives in San Francisco. of color is an experimental essay about color, hybridity, and art-making. It is a memoir of Agard’s coming to North America and encountering binaries of black and white. Moving through the colors blue, black, white, and red, of color interweaves image, art criticism, historical document, and lyric to feel out the domains of colorism, performative exoticism, and the thrills of collective blackness. It is a manifesto for an experience of color that embraces change: the prismatic, the perverse, and that which is wholly beyond definition. The War Requiem by KAIA PREUS
Photo credit: Amy Stockhaus
Kaia Preus teaches writing in Minneapolis. She received her MFA from Hollins University and is a 2019 Author Fellow through the Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in Barely South Review, The Briar Cliff Review, The Drum, Pleiades, and Watershed Review. She is currently at work on a novel and a collection of essays. The War Requiem blends memoir, research, and historical fiction, in order to explore Benjamin Britten’s dynamic piece of choral and orchestral music, the War Requiem, Op. 66. Written to commemorate the new Coventry Cathedral’s consecration (following World War II bombing), the War Requiem blends the Latin Mass for the Dead with nine poems by Wilfred Owen. Just as Britten’s piece pulls together many threads and subjects, this book braids three separate stories of Britten, Owen, and the author, to better understand the process of art-making and the lasting effects of both art and war. FINALISTS Krys Malcolm Belc, The Natural Mother of the Child 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.
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