2012 New Writers Award Winners

The Great Lakes Colleges Association is pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 GLCA New Writers Award for fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Now in its 43rd year, the New Writers Award confers recognition on promising writers who have published a first volume in one of the three genres. Winning writers receive invitations to visit GLCA member colleges, where they give readings, meet and talk about writing with students and faculty members.

The 2012 winner for fiction is Alan Heathcock, Volt, a collection of stories, published by Graywolf Press. Our GLCA judges note:

Heathcock’s tormented characters wrestle with big, weighty questions of justice and punishment in the face of violent death. These electrically-charged characters are running for their lives, away from their lives, to escape the untamable forces of nature and their own untamable selves. These stories wonder on how frail the thing called civilization, how frayed the social compact. There is no better place to visit the myth of modernity than to venture into America’s cornfields, barrooms, ranch houses. Sometimes we become mean and violent; Heathcock knows this and does not avert his eyes. These are intense, harrowing stories, stories that explore characters and their trials thoroughly, with very high stakes throughout. In gorgeous, muscular prose, Heathcock paints a mythic vision of rural America that, for all its horror, evokes a deep and genuine sympathy that won’t let you turn away.

The 2012 winner for poetry is Shane Book, Ceiling of Sticks, published by The University of Nebraska Press. Our judges note:

This collection of poems offers a powerful example of 21st century littérature engagée, or politically engaged poetry. Shane Book combines the textual and physical worlds to achieve what the best of politically engaged poetry can accomplish: giving a sense of the troubled textures of a world out there that is not depicted usefully by mass media, providing voice to those who otherwise cannot speak their own stories, and problematizing the very notion of language in writing about a world in which language itself is contaminated. Beautiful language – but inhuman and morally oblivious at the same time. In this collection a reader sees the aesthetic confronting the rawness of the world itself, and vice versa. Shane Book accomplishes an engagement both global and intimate, with images both lyrical and disturbing regardless of being anchored in Canada or Ghana – within his own life and family or in the lives of strangers.

The 2012 winner for creative non-fiction is Danielle Cadena Deulen, The Riots, published by The University of Georgia Press. Our judges note:

These (often very short) essays are highly compressed and highly realized, sharply drawn, intense in their urgently lyrical way, exquisitely written. Deulen's dialogues and descriptions, fractured and prismatic throughout, seem to burn rather than ease into memory, so charged is her language, and so deft her capacity for rendering stark, surreal scenes. This is a book written with a care for language – the imagery is often beautiful and surprising, the surprise like tiny explosions now and again within a sentence, a paragraph, on a page. The beauty not a pretty beauty, but sometimes ugly in a tough, edgy way. The organization of the book follows the associative logic of poetry – or of memory. The innovative, non-chronological sequence in which these pieces are placed creates a larger story that feels bigger than the sum of its parts and digs deep into the racial and gendered consciousness of the narrator and the times and places in which her story takes place.

Judges of the New Writers Awards are faculty members of GLCA’s member colleges.

Judges for the 2012 poetry award were:

Daniel Bourne, College of Wooster;
Eugene Gloria, DePauw University; and
Janet McAdams, Kenyon College.

Judges of the 2012 fiction award were:

David Harris Ebenbach, Earlham College;
Robert Olmstead, Ohio Wesleyan University; and
Margot Singer, Denison University.

Judges of the 2012 award in creative non-fiction were:

Marin Heinritz, Kalamazoo College;
Kirk Nessett, Allegheny College; and
Sylvia Watanabe, Oberlin College.

For more information on the New Writers Award, please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , director of the New Writers Award, or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , coordinator of the New Writers Award. Additional information is available on the GLCA web site: www.glca.org.