Mark your
calendars now
For April
banquet in
TIL president Fran Vick has announced
arrangements for our April 13-14, 2007, annual meeting in
Rooms with special rates have been set aside at the Hilton Park Cities
Hotel (
Plans include a reception on Friday evening, April 13, at the same site where TIL was founded in 1936—the Hall of State at Fair Park; a Saturday morning bus tour that will include interesting and historic sites in Dallas hosted by Darwin Payne (if interest warrants it); a lunch for officers from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at the hotel; readings by new members from 3 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the hotel; and a cocktail party followed by the banquet on Saturday evening.
The hotel is a fine one with a wonderful restaurant. It is located in the
It promises to be a rousing, fun-filled weekend, so please mark your calendars to be there.
Dobie-Paisano
applications
deadline is January
26
Applications for Dobie-Paisano writing fellowships, sponsored by the
Texas Institute of Letters and the
The fellowships offer six months in residence at the late J. Frank
Dobie’s ranch 14 miles west of
Two fellowships will be awarded for 2007-2008. The first begins Sept. 1, 2007, and the second on March 1, 2008. Each provides a living allowance of $2,000 monthly during residence.
At the time of application one of the following
requirements must be met: (1) the applicant must be a native Texan, (2) must
have lived in
Criteria for making the awards include quality of work, character of the proposed project, and suitability of the applicant for life at Paisano. Applicants must submit examples of their work in triplicate. Application fee is $10. Winners are announced in early May.
The form, “Application for Fellowship at Paisano—2007-2008,” may be obtained from www.utexas.edu/ogs/Paisano. Three copies of this application must be submitted with the rest of the entry and mailed in a single package.
Information about the fellowships and the application also may be obtained via mail by writing Dobie-Paisano Project, J. Frank Dobie House, 702 East Dean Keeton St., Austin, Texas 78705; Fax: 512-471-9997; or email: aslate@mail.utexas.edu.
The fellowships are known as the Ralph A. Johnston Memorial Fellowship and the Jesse H. Jones Writing Fellowship. The living stipend is provided by the Johnston Foundation, the Houston Endowment, the Susan Vaughan Foundation and from donations from TIL members and former Paisano fellows.
Thanks to yeoman service from C.W. Smith, the TIL website has a new address. Here it is: http://www.smu.edu/english/creativewriting/The_Texas_Institute_of_Letters.htm.
You can get there through Google, even if indirectly at the moment.
News of Members and Others
A nice thing has just happened in
Our husband and wife team of L.C. and LaVerne Harrell Clark
presented readings from their fiction at the annual conference of the Texas
Teachers of Creative Writing for
Our very best wishes are going out to Tom Zigal, who, as you may know, experienced a brain hemorrhage in August. “Nothing major,” he says with such modesty! He was hoping to parlay his mishap with a leave of absence from UT-Austin so he can complete a novel.
Jerry W. Bradley, dean of graduate studies at
Lou Rodenberger’s biography, Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work, will be published in
December by Texas Tech University Press. Lou has been busy this year. She
published an essay in Roundup Magazine (August) entitled “Tom Lea,
Novelist: The Eyes of an Artist, the Ears of a Writer,” and an essay on the
early-day
John Rechy was presented with the
inaugural ONE Culture Hero Award in
Lawrence Wright is gaining all sorts of kudos for his important
new book, The
Allen Wier’s epic novel of the Western frontier, Tejano (SMU Press), was praised in the Dallas Morning News as a book that “may well be the Great Texas Novel or as close to that abstraction as any writer has come.”
You already know that Marshall Terry is an institution at SMU as well at the Texas Institute of Letters, and—as we’ve reported in this newsletter previously—SMU will honor him this spring. Now more details are available. The three-day affair, to be held in conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the SMU Literary Festival, will be from Thursday, March 29, through Saturday, March 31.It’s called “Marshall Terry: 50 Years of Vision.” There will be readings from his novels and short stories, readings from works by his former students, and a panel discussion about Marsh’s career. Some of the presenters already lined up include Joe Coomer, Tracy Daugherty, James Hoggard, David Searcy, Lewis Shiner, Jack Myers, and C.W. Smith. Registration for it begins on Nov. 17. More details are available at http://www.smu.edu/english/Events/marshterry/index.htm.
Poetry Award Prize Increased;
Judge’s Address Corrected
On an entirely pleasant note, the prize to be awarded for the Helen C. Smith memorial Award for Best Book of Poetry has been increased from $1,000 to $1,200.
In the last newsletter’s list of
judges for the TIL literary competition, the address of
Greg Glazner, a poetry judge, was incomplete. The full address should be: Greg Glazner, c/o Creative Writing Department,
Some of our recent mailings have been returned
because of address changes. Do you know of the new addresses of any of these
members? Ai, formerly at
Names of Judges and Addresses
There’s still time to submit entries for our annual TIL literary contests. Deadline: Jan. 7, 2007. Submissions should be sent to each judge. We repeat below the names and addresses of the judges. Eligibility details are in the previous newsletter and on the website, http://www.smu.edu/english/creativewriting/The_Texas_Institute_of_Letters.htm..
Carr P. Collins Award for
Best Book of Nonfiction ($5,000)
Ricardo Ainslie,
chair
Betty
Wiesepape
1706
Nate
Blakeslee
Jesse Jones Award for Best
Work of Fiction ($6,000)
Steven Turner Award for Best
Work of First Fiction ($1,000)
Cheryl Chapman,
chair
Ruth
McAdams
Clay
Reynolds, chair
Paul
H. Carlson
Dept. of
History
Russell L. Martin
III
Director, DeGolyer
Library
Southern
Kay Cattarulla Award for Best
Short Story ($750)
Jan
Seale, chair
400
Sycamore
William
Hauptman
Claire
Osborne
1406
Windsor,
Helen C. Smith Memorial Award
for Best Book of Poetry ($1,200)
Frances E. Neidhardt,
chair
Greg
Glazner
Creative Writing
Department
1600
St. Michael’s Drive
H.
Palmer Hall
Box
1 Camino
Soeurette Diehl Fraser Award
for Best Translation of a Book ($1,000)
Lynn
Hoggard, chair
Harvey
Yunis
Department of Classics, MS
150
Dennis
Kratz
Dean, Arts and
Humanities
O. Henry Award for Best Work
of Magazine Journalism ($1,000)
Ben
Fountain, chair
Tom
Huang
Features
Editor
The
Jeff
Guinn
Friends of the Austin Public
Library Award for Best Children’s Book ($500)
And Best Young Adult Book
($500)
Joyce Roach,
chair
Jeanne
Williams
Mary
D. Wade
17522 Brushy
Fred Whitehead Award for Best
Design of a Trade Book ($750)
Dick
Holland, chair
Kay
Cattarulla
Gerald
Saxon
3409
W.K.
Stratton, chair
Round
Robert
Compton
Carolyn
Barta