Four Minnesota State University, Mankato master of fine arts students recently won 2009 Robert Wright Awards for imaginative writing, including fiction, nonfiction and poetry.
Amanda Schumacher, Lesley Arimah, Heather Elliott and Seth Calvert won the awards, announced recently.
Schumacher, of Amery, Wis., won the first-place award of $800 for creative nonfiction/fiction. Judge Leigh Allison Wilson described Schumacher as an author who “investigates the mysterious interstices between life and death, mystery and manners . . . with a fine intelligence and originality (that) makes her prose a memorable experience for her readers.”
Arimah, of Lafayette, La., won second place ($500) for fiction. Wilson said Arimah “takes characters in extreme situations and, somehow, renders their emotional states into feelings we all recognize as a mirror to our own.”
Elliott, of Wausau, Wis., took third place ($400) for poetry. Wilson called Elliott “a poet’s poet, and the range she shows in these twelve poems both delights and sobers her readers.”
Calvert, of Peshtigo, Wis., received honorable mention for his creative nonfiction. “The wit and humor of this piece meshes astonishingly well with the arcane complexities of what J.R.R. Tolkien called ‘that brutal seductress’ of a language, Greek,” said the judge.
There were 31 entries in this year’s Wright competition. The annual awards are open to Minnesota State Mankato undergraduate and graduate students. The winners must use the prize money for college expenses.
Wilson, an author and professor at the State University of New York in Oswego, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction and the Saltonstall Award for nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Harper’s, Mademoiselle, Grand Street, Kenyon Review, Georgia Review and Southern Review, among other publications. Her books include “Wind: Stories and From the Bottom Up.”
The Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system comprises 32 state universities, community colleges, technical colleges and combined community and technical colleges located on 54 campuses across the state. The system serves approximately 250,000 students annually in credit-based courses and another 140,000 in non-credit courses.
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