English and creative writing faculty gather accolades
Congratulations
to 2015-2016 Willson Center Faculty Fellow Magdalena Zurawski, who has won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award for Companion Animal, her 2015 collection from Litmus Press. Zurawski (pictured with the poet Sonia Sanchez at the PSA Awards ceremony in New York City) is an assistant professor of English and creative writing and the author of the 2008 novel The Bruise, which won both a 2008 Lambda Award and the 2007 Ronald Sukenick-American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize.
Ed Pavlić, professor of English and creative writing and a recent Willson Center Faculty Fellow, published two books in 2015: Let’s Let That Are Not Yet : Inferno (National Poetry Series, Fence Books),
a blend of poetry, lyrical prose, and memoir, and Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners (Fordham University Press), “a meditation on the life, writings, and legacy of James Baldwin and their relationship to the lyric tradition in black music.” Let’s Let that Are Not Yet has been shortlisted for the 2016 Firecracker Awards for Independent Literary Publishing in Poetry, and the noted music author and critic Dave Marsh listed Who Can Afford to Improvise? first in his recent summation of the best music books of the last year. Pavlić has three more books completed or in progress: a novel, a collection of poems, and his eagerly awaited No Time to Rest: James Baldwin’s Life in Letters to His Brother David.