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 winner of our 2020 book contest: RENEE GLADMAN has selected To Love an Artist by VALERIE HSIUNG.
“Valerie Hsiung’s To Love an Artist is a work composed of dislocations—or rather, durations, expanses of dislocated voices, bodies, and narratives. It is a series of studies on ductility and leaching—what we are at our base and what we become when brought, whether violently or voluntarily, in proximity to others, other species of being, other modes of existing, other methods of naming: the lines we cross, ‘Language from bronze infects language from copper.’ When the poet writes, ‘Today, I speak a language of brutes,’ I read the enfoldment of the cruelty our collective and respective histories into the languages of our subjectivity. Any expression of self or free-ness or united-ness is laden with material and intentions that do not belong to us. We have been mixed forever, we have poured and burned through borders always, and are ourselves burned and poured through. And that is why it is useful to invent forms for the expression of our alloyed selves, to be non-knowing.
To Love an Artist presents a despondent, broken, scattered form. Yet, it pulses with nuance and engagement. It’s beautiful, irreverent, and dangerously incoherent. It stays with you when you’ve stopped reading it and puts your seeing in disarray. It nourishes and it fails and it teaches.
This is a book of refusal. It is a cosmography written as metallurgy; it wants to be the dust and it wants to be the friction.”
— RENEE GLADMAN, from her introduction
VALERIE HSIUNG is a poet, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and author of several poetry and hybrid writing collections—hummingbird et partygirl (Essay Press, forthcoming), outside voices, please (CSU, September 2021), Name Date of Birth Emergency Contact (The Gleaners), YOU & ME FOREVER (Action Books), and e f g (Action). Born in the Year of the Earth Snake and raised by Chinese-Taiwanese immigrants in Cincinnati, Ohio, she now lives between nowhere and somewhere.
FINALISTS
A Petit Mal by Ana Maria Caballero
A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in by Brenda Iijima and Janice Lee
Daughter Grows a Horizon by Caroline Tracey
A Natural History of Cruising by Christopher Schmidt and Welsey Macedo
write like a girl by Christy Davids
You’re the Woods Too by Dennis James Sweeney
The Pré by Ella Longpre
Exhibitions by Jehanne Dubrow
DAPHNE by Kristen Case
My Mind Wanders in an Anxious Mood by Natalie Bakopoulos
Dear Gordon by Robin Bruce
Of Lack by Sara Sheiner
The Bird Hat Wearer’s Journal by Sarah Rose Nordgren
Returning the Gaze: Viewings by Spring Ulmer
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Paralytic States by Kelsey Sucena
Essays on Waiting by Lindsay Turner
Where Was I Again by Olivia Muenz
Unoriginal Name (A cabinet of keys and codes) by Raphael Rae
Policy: A Performance Essay by Zahra Patterson
About Essay Press / 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.