UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS STUDENT WRITERS RAKE IN NATIONAL AWARDS

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas’ nationally-ranked creative writing program completed its best year to date, thanks to four students whose talents garnered some of the most prestigious honors available to young writers.

Faculty and students in the University’s MFA program received a cascade of good news at the close of the semester when they learned that the Academy of American Poets had awarded graduating writer Tony Tost its prestigious Walt Whitman First Book Prize. In addition, fourth-year fiction writer Hardin Young won the highly competitive Playboy College Fiction Contest. Stanford University selected graduating poet Brian Spears as a 2003 Stegner Fellow. And third-year student Nic Pizzolatto learned that two of his stories soon would appear in The Atlantic Monthly.

"Without question, this has been a terrific year for our students," said Donald Hays, director of the creative writing program. "I don’t know of another program that can boast four honors this big."

The news follows an earlier announcement that three poets associated with the UA creative writing program — assistant professor Davis McCombs and alumnae Beth Ann Fennelly and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright — were among 38 writers, selected from more than 1,650 applicants, to receive literary fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Established in 1975, the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Prize affords one poet each year the chance to publish his first full-length collection. It bestows a $5000 cash prize as well as a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center. In addition, the prize guarantees that the Academy will buy at least 10,000 copies of the book for distribution among its members.

Tost’s collection "Invisible Bride" beat out more than 1,400 other manuscripts from writers across the nation. In selecting the 2003 winner, contest judge C.D. Wright praised the innovative form and style of Tost’s poetry and noted the dreamlike lingering of his verse in the mind.

"A strange and penetrating book. Questing and questioning, full of wonder and doubt. It draws you in and down.." Wright wrote in her assessment. "This is a journey a reader is compelled to take, like the boys of [Tost’s] poem who 'carried rocks back and forth in the frost, then came home and made some sleep.’ The overall sensation is of being left heavy and weightless. It is not a common condition. Did I say it was beautifully executed?"

Tost came to the University of Arkansas in 1999, a graduate of Green River Community College in Auburn, Wash., and College of the Ozarks in Missouri. From the start, his work defied the conventions of narrative poetry, said his advisor, professor Michael Heffernan. Rather than describing character or circumstance, Tost’s poetry explores and ultimately reveals both through the narrator’s own thoughts. His poems break free of form, stretching across the page so that words, not line breaks, shape their rhythm.

"Tony is a poet who’s willing to experiment, invent and discover, to find new language for the feelings and insight that come out of experiences. He has an inexhaustible imagination and a willingness to set it to the page," Heffernan said. "You’ll never walk into a room that Tony Tost creates and know who you’ll be by the time you walk back out of it."

"Invisible Bride," to be published in Spring 2004 by the Louisiana State University Press, contains a series of poems narrated by a central character. "I didn’t want just a random collection of poetry. My goal was to develop a personality over the course of the collection, one fully varied and intelligent," Tost explained.

Though the poems vary in topic and style, their overall theme revolves around a search for companionship and completion — a love that doesn’t just satisfy but makes whole. All were written over the last year and a half of Tost’s studies at the U of A.

"The award is a big validation," Tost said. "As a writer, you spend a lot of time questioning whether you’re wasting your time, and I think the prize and the book, when it comes out, will put some of those questions to rest for me."

This fall, writers at the University of Arkansas really will read Playboy magazine for the articles. That’s because one of their own — fourth-year MFA student Hardin Young — will be published in the October 2003 issue as the winner of Playboy’s annual college fiction contest.

Young’s story "The One Percenter" was selected from over 600 entries worldwide to win the top prize — $3,000 and publication in the magazine.

"Aside from the fact that it’s quite well written, Hardin’s story stood out because of the amazing voice of its narrator," said writer Alice Turner, who judged the competition. "It’s rare to find voice in student fiction, particularly a voice as funny and full of character as the one Hardin created."

According to Young, the story follows the perspective of a man who finds himself embroiled in a gang war between motorcycle clubs. "It’s a voice piece — very character driven. The situation is almost secondary. You’ve basically got this guy in the club, mouthing off and having trouble relating to people," Young said.

A native of Redmond, Wash., Young originally planned to attend film school and produce screenplays. He switched to creative writing during his undergraduate years at the University of Southern California and found himself better suited to prose. In 2000, he entered the University of Arkansas MFA program, drawn by the program’s focus on craft and by the caliber of the faculty.

"The first step in applying to the UA program is just to send your writing. That’s the only thing they judge," Young said. "To me, that showed that the priorities of the program were in the right place. Then once I got here, I found that the faculty are just tremendously supportive."

Now entering his final year in the MFA program, Young intends to complete a book manuscript and publish more short fiction. The appearance in Playboy magazine represents his first publication and an auspicious start. Now in its twentieth year, the Playboy College Fiction Contest is one of the most competitive student fiction competitions in the nation, promoted by the magazine as the "first [competition] of its kind in the United States."

Brian Spears expected to graduate from the University’s MFA program this spring, move to south Florida, write some poetry and find a job. But an unexpected e-mail in early May persuaded him to exchange one sunshine state for another. Rather than heading to southern Florida, Spears will travel to Palo Alto, California, to begin a two-year residency at Stanford University.

Choosing from more than 1,300 applicants nationwide, Stanford University awarded Spears one of its 2003 Stegner Fellowships for creative writing. Named for Wallace Stegner, novelist and founder of the Stanford writing program, the fellowship provides tuition and a $22,000 per year stipend for five fiction writers and five poets each year.

During their two-year residencies on the Stanford campus, Stegner Fellows devote themselves to the craft of writing and the completion of specific projects. They attend two workshops per week, with other fellows in their genre. The award represents one of the most coveted and competitive fellowships in the nation, said UA poetry professor Davis McCombs, who won the fellowship in 1996.

"This fellowship is the gift of two years to write, fully funded, in the most beautiful of surroundings, among a community of other writers," said McCombs, Spears’ UA advisor. "It’s so prestigious. As a poet, it opens doors to you — creatively and career-wise. I don’t think Brian knows what this means yet. I didn’t when I won it."

Spears, who holds a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from Southeastern Louisiana University, began writing seriously at the age of 26. He came to the University of Arkansas in 1999 and over the past four years has tapped into his love of music, his fascination with emotion, and his early experiences in the Jehovah’s Witness Church as sources to inform and inspire his poetry.

"Music and religion will always figure into my poetry because they’re such a large part of my life. But thematically, I’m always looking for the hidden connection between objects and people and emotions," Spears said. "I aim for honesty above all because readers can smell a fake. The writers who stick around, who make it, are the ones most honest about the human spirit."

During his fellowship tenure, Spears intends to complete his first collection of poems, drawing particularly on his fundamentalist upbringing and its subsequent meaning in his life as a theme for the book.

Spears will not be the only University of Arkansas alumnus on the Stanford campus next year. Scott Hutchins, who graduated from the U of A in 1997 with bachelors degrees in French and English, also received a 2003 Stegner Fellowship. According to a Stanford University press release, Hutchins will use the fellowship to revise and polish the draft of a novel, set in southern Arkansas in the 1980s.

Perhaps the youngest University of Arkansas writer to garner national attention this year is Nicholas Pizzolatto. After only two years of instruction in fiction writing at the U of A, the first two stories Pizzolatto submitted for publication were immediately snapped up by The Atlantic Monthly, one of the nation’s premiere magazines for literature and journalism.

"Nic’s a remarkable talent. I don’t know of another person who’s had two stories accepted by The Atlantic Monthly in a single package," said Donald Hays, Pizzolatto’s advisor. "His stories are forcefully written and deeply imagined, and he puts no small amount of research into their making."

Titled "Ghost Birds" and "Between Here and the Yellow Sea," Pizzolatto’s stories are scheduled for publication as early as fall of this year. "Ghost Birds," which will appear first, centers around an adrenaline-addicted park ranger, whose extreme pursuits are interrupted by the arrival of a female college student, researching urban legends.

The second story concerns a car trip, undertaken by a young man and his former football coach. The two embark on a quixotic quest to kidnap the coach’s daughter, who has become an adult film star in Los Angeles. According to Pizzolatto, the journey is used to drift back and forth through time as the young man comes to terms with recent revelations about his past and with the life he’s made for himself.

Pizzolatto, who began college as a visual artist, switched to writing and literature while still an undergraduate at Louisiana State University. "People always told me my drawings told stories, held narratives, so the shift to writing seemed natural," he said. "My art and my writing deal with similar themes: memory and solitude. I’m fascinated by how memory influences life and how we corrupt it with what we want, how we live with our own desires."

Regarding his sudden success in publication, Pizzolatto credits the caliber of the faculty in the UA creative writing program and their commitment to teaching.

"The UA program offers an incredible amount of personal attention. There’s a real relationship between the teaching writer and the student writer here," Pizzolatto said. "I consider it a selling point of the UA program that its teachers are generous and genuine enough to still get excited about their students’ work."