Texas Institute of
Letters
July/August/September
2010
Newsletter
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It’s time
to pay your dues for fiscal year 2010-11. Please use the form at the end of
this newsletter when remitting them.
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Judges Named
Thirty distinguished judges have been named for TIL’s 2010 literary contests. They will select finalists and winners for the best works of the year in thirteen categories.
The judges will award writers a total of $22,450 at TIL’s annual banquet to be held this year in the spring of 2011 in Dallas.
Submissions of works published in the calendar year of 2010 must be sent to each member of the appropriate committees at the addresses listed below. They must be postmarked no later than Jan. 9, 2011. A single work may be entered in only one category.
The container of each entry must bear the words, “For TIL Award,” and inside must be the name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address of the entrant. Also included must be a statement of eligibility confirming that the entrant was born in Texas or lived in Texas for at least two consecutive years at some time. A work whose subject matter substantially concerns Texas is also eligible. Books submitted for entry will not be returned.
Following are the names and addresses for each of the contests:
Jesse Jones award for fiction ($6,000) and Steven Turner award for first
fiction ($1,000): Bryan Woolley, chair, 18040 Midway Rd., #215,
Dallas, TX 75287; Pat Carr, 10695 Venice Rd., Elkins, AR 71717; Shirley Grau,
12 Nassau Dr., Metairie, LA 70005.
Carr P. Collins Award for NonFiction ($5,000): Rico Ainslie, chair, 3208 Gilbert St., Austin, TX 78703; Robert Compton, 3205 S. Glenbrook Dr., Garland, TX 75041-4404, Light Cummins, 1410 Greenbrier, Sherman, Texas 75092.
til award for Scholarly book ($2,500): Ty
Cashion, chair, 14 Hawkseye Place, The Woodlands, TX 77381; Steve Davis,
Southwestern Writers Collection, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX; Gary
LaVergne, P.O. Box 7052, Austin, TX 78713-7052.
helen c. smith memorial award for Poetry ($1,200) and BOB BUSH MEMORIAL AWARD FOR FIRST BOOK OF POETRY ($1,000): Jan Seale, chair, 400 Sycamore Ave., McAllen, TX 78501; Dave Parsons, 414 Oakhill Dr., Conroe, TX 77304; Wendy Barker, 302 Fawn Dr., San Antonio, TX 78231-1519. Please note: The judges will not consider chapbooks for either prize.
O. Henry AWARD for magazine journalism ($1,000): Noel Parsons, chair, 231 Lake McCoy Dr., Apopha, Florida 32712; George Getschow, 6931 Red Bud Dr., Flower Mound, TX 75022; Jim Hornfischer, 2528 Tanglewood Trail, Austin, TX 78703.
austin public library friends foundation award, children’s book ($500) and young adult book ($500): Jane Roberts Wood, chair, 567 N. Gibbons, Argyle, TX 76226; Jean Flynn, 101 Cliffside Dr., San Antonio, TX 78231; Jerry Craven, 3309 Chelsea Place, Temple, TX 76502.
kay cattarulla award for Short story ($1,000): Paul Ruffin, chair; 2014 Avenue N. ½, Huntsville, TX 77341; Francis (Ab) Abernethy, 210 S. Lanana, Nacogdoches, TX 75961; Lynn Hoggard, 111 Pembroke Lane, Wichita Falls, TX 76301.
Stanley Walker AWARD for newspaper journalism ($1,000): Fran Vick, chair, 6335 W. Northwest Hwy., #618, Dallas, TX 75225; Mike Cochran, 4509 Starlight Dr., Fort Worth, TX 76117; Jan Reid, 2107 West 11th St., Austin, TX 78703.
fred whitehead award for design of a trade book ($750): Paula Marks, chair, 104 Vireo Dr., Buda, TX 78610; Sally Leach, 4231 Westlake Dr., Austin, TX 78746; Ron Tyler, 5536 Collinwood Ave., Fort Worth, TX 76107.
soeurette diehl fraser award for translation of a book ($1,000): Rainer Schulte, chair, 605 West Lamar, McKinney, TX 75069; Nicholas Pappas, Sam Houston State University, Department of History, Box 2239, Huntsville, TX 77341-2239; Charles D. Hatfield, 806 Evergreen Hills Rd., Dallas, TX 75208. This award is presented biennially, so books published in both 2009 and 2010 are eligible.
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Member News
Texas Monthly Editor Jake Silverstein has announced the retirement of Gary Cartwright as a staff writer for the magazine, thus ending a 37-year relationship between Gary and TM. Well, sort of. Silverstein told readers Gary will still be writing for the magazine “when the spirit moves him.” Gary made a memorable splash in the very first issue of Texas Monthly with a profile of controversial Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas and his byline has been a continual TM presence ever since. Gary’s final piece as a full-fledged staffer, in the August issue, is a profile of John Graves, who also made significant contributions to TM in its earlier days. At the time of Gary’s retirement announcement, he and Jan Reid were the only two writers remaining who wrote for Texas Monthly in its first year (1973) and were still writing regularly for it. ««« Prestigious awards for Rico Ainslie keep on coming. In the last newsletter, we reported news of his receiving a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Now comes word that Rico is completing a Rockefeller Foundation residency, during which he continues work on his book about violence-stricken Ciudad Juarez. Not bad for a guy who first made a name for himself by recording Mexico’s first rock-and-roll song as a teenager. ««« HBO is airing Lawrence Wright’s documentary, My Trip to al-Qaeda, in September. Larry also has a new one-man show, "The Human Scale," opening at The New Yorker Festival on October 2nd, and running for the rest of the month at 3LD, a theater in lower Manhattan. ««« Rick Bass has a new novel out, Nashville Chrome, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Rick describes it as “. . . a work of historical fiction about the Browns, a hardscrabble family in Arkansas who were, by the 1950s, the biggest thing in country music--bigger than Elvis, who was a close family friend. The Browns were Chet Atkins' favorite group to record, were the Beatles' favorite American group--the Beatles tried to learn to harmonize from the Browns--and were confidantes of Johnny Cash, among others. Elvis was engaged to Bonnie Brown, one of the Browns' trio. They were the first group to have a number one hit on the country and pop charts, setting the stage for the crossover hits of today. Then the Browns vanished. The novel is about that vanishing, and the desire by the oldest Brown for a comeback, at the age of 80, and a meditation on the nature of fame.” ««« Ben Fountain's fiction has recently appeared in the Iowa Review. His essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in the New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, and the public radio show This American Life. During 2009 he served as visiting professor at UT-Austin and at UNC-Wilmington. ««« Jim Sanderson has been busy during 2010. His story collection, Faded Love, was published by Ink Brush Press. In addition, he’s placed several individual pieces: “Massage Therapy,” to appear in anthology of stories inspired by Texas songwriters published by Ink Brush Press in 2011; “Playing Scared,” Mystery in the Wind, 2010; “Becky,” Main Street Rag, Summer 2010; “Comanchería,” Chariton Review, Spring 2010; “Hell on Horses and Women: Texas Maleness in Stillwell, Beasley, Porter, and McCarthy,” Southwestern Literature, Spring 2010. ««« L. D. Clark is working on a book he says is perhaps too grandiosely entitled Intimations of Immortality, which concerns the vast number of changes he has witnessed in the eighty-seven years he has spent on earth so far – and a bit of what he has perhaps learned from them. The first chapter will be published in the Langdon Review of the Arts in September. ««« Owen Wister: Chronicler of the West, Gentleman of the East by Darwin Payne will be coming back into print as a Bison Book from the University of Nebraska Press. Darwin won TIL’s scholarly book award for Owen Wister in 1986. ««« Robin Doughty has signed a contract with the University of Texas Press to publish a book co-authored by Virginia Carmichael to be entitled The Albatross and the Fish: Fashioning an Environmental Regime in the Ocean Commons. It’s scheduled for publication in Fall 2011. ««« The Tennessee Commission on the Arts has awarded Allen Weir an Individual Artist Fellowship. ««« Blind Rain by Bruce Bond was named as finalist for the Poets’ Prize, and he gave a reading at the award ceremony at the Nicholas Roerich Museum in New York City in May. His book Peal was recently released from Etruscan Press. His poems also appeared this past year in Raritan, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, Hopkins Review, and Southwest Review. ««« Larry D. Thomas recently donated his papers to the Ralph W. Steen Library at Stephen F. Austin State University. In appreciation of Thomas's gift, the university held a reception in his honor at the library on April 15. Following the reception, the university sponsored a reading/book-signing by Thomas at the Cole Art Center in downtown Nacogdoches. His new poetry collection is The Skin of Light (Dalton Publishing). ««« Judy Alter has now fully retired from TCU Press and is enjoying retirement and time to write. The new director of TCU Press is Dr. Dan Williams. ««« Carolyn Banks has been busy running Upstart (a nonprofit that promotes “visual literacy” and media arts outreach) in Bastrop with an eye to turning Bastrop into the Rural Movie Capital of Texas. Upstart is just about to insulate a 7,000-square-foot sound stage to attract low-budget filmmakers to Bastrop. Banks' feature movie, Invicta, which she wrote and directed, just had its world premiere in Bastrop and is making the rounds to distributors. Banks also helped write KPOW, a script about a fictional public access television station in the fictional town of “Bass Drop, Texas.” She is directing and editing the series and it will air on Bastrop Community Access Television as well as on www.upstartbastrop.com. It is funded in part by Texas Commission on the Arts. Meanwhile, Upstart optioned William Browning Spencer's story, "A Child's Christmas in Florida," and scripted "A Child's Christmas in Texas" based on it. Jessica Gardner directed the short film with Carolyn producing. The short will air at Upstart's Off Kilter Xmas Festival in Bastrop December 12. Another entry that will air at the festival is "You Say," with a script by Chad Dean; it was directed by Sidney Brammer and produced by Carolyn. ««« David Farmer lectured in June on New Mexico writers and their books for the SMU-in-Taos Colloquium Series; the series has been going for almost 30 years at Fort Burgwin near Taos. His talk was titled "From Josiah Gregg to Edward Abbey, Book Trails Across New Mexico." David also lectured on Willard Clark for the Chavez Library Lectures at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. His book, Willard Clark, Printer and Printmaker, was first published by the Four-O Imprint at Hardin Simmons University in 2000 and won the TIL's Stanley Marcus Award for Best Book Design in 2001. It was reprinted in an expanded edition in 2008 by the Museum of New Mexico Press. David continues his quest for Mexican folk art, especially work by Heron Martinez. ««« C.W. Smith’s story “Caustic” appeared in the Summer issue of the Southwest Review. His new novel Steplings will be published by TCU Press in 2011. Along with the print version of the novel, TCU will publish it in its new e-book series, Efrog. His recent novel Purple Hearts will be included in that series as well. ««« A short story of Jay Brandon’s published in an anthology last year, "A Jury of His Peers," is going to be included in The Best American Mystery Stories 2010, coming out in October. Jay says he has always wanted to get into one of these “Best of...” anthologies, so he is thrilled by his inclusion. His story is set in San Antonio and based on a historical incident involving a Mexican general who came across the border in 1842, captured all the lawyers in San Antonio, and took them hostage to Mexico. The story is a fictional aftermath of that event. ««« Ceilia Morris plans to spend most of October in South Africa, prompted to go there to visit Celia Dugger and Dugger’s husband, Barry Bearak, who are the New York Times bureau chiefs in Johannesburg. “They spent four years in New Delhi and I went twice to see them there – both of them life-changing trips” Ceilia says. “I'm reading a lot of Nadine Gordimer and am fascinated by the similarities and differences between our racial history and theirs. So much of this history is excruciatingly painful.” ««« A.G. Mojtabai soon will be publishing her tenth book, Parts Of A World: A Novel with Northwestern University Press, scheduled for Spring 2011. ««« In late spring, within the space of twenty days, Tino Villanueva gave eight (poetry) readings that took him to several universities in Spain and Italy, reading in both English and Spanish. “My last reading – and the crowning moment of it all – was reading at the Dylan Thomas birthplace house in Swansea, Wales,” Tino reports. ««« Alas, we have more member news than space for it in this issue of the newsletter, but we’ll catch up with it in the next issue. A final note: a number of TIL members will be appearing at the Texas Book Festival, October 16-17.Here’s a link: http://www.texasbookfestival.org/Authors.php.
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President’s Message
Our TIL members, I’m pleased to report, have cheerfully responded to the news that we’ll have our own booth at the Texas Book Festival on Oct. 16 and 17.
The Festival puts on a terrific, enjoyable program, always boasting of some of the nation’s top writers. Most of you probably have attended in the past, many of you in featured roles. That’ll be true this year, too. However, we have many TIL members who won’t be featured because they didn’t write a book this year or perhaps, even if they did, weren’t selected. So, we’ll feature them ourselves at our own booth!
We’ll actually have two booths combined into one. Each booth is 10 x 10 feet, so we’ll have 20 x 10 feet. The Festival will provide a TIL sign, a couple of tables, and four folding chairs. We’ll supplement that with a few more chairs that, I hope, will be more comfortable, and perhaps another table or two.
There are a couple of reasons for us to be there. Well, actually three.
First, we anticipate that our booth will be a meeting place for TIL members, a place to sit for a while, to relax, to talk a bit amongst ourselves.
Two, we want to feature our own members and their books, no matter when published. We want the public to know that TIL members are active producers. The booths will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 16, and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 17. We’re asking members who will be there to bring a few of their books that they can sell a few of them by cash or check (and sign them) during one-hour sessions. We’ll probably have two at a time. (You know how it is when you’re at your own book signing and there’s no one there but you and you sometimes get lonely. Well, we’ll take care of that by having two at once! Maybe even three?)
We’ll post a prominent schedule at the booth listing which of us will be there at certain times, and then we’ll have a sign identifying you, your hometown, and mentioning a few of your books while you’re sitting there looking like the prominent author that you are!
Thus far I’ve received word from a couple of dozen of you that you’ll be willing to participate. Let me hear from you, and we’ll add you to the list.
Oh, yes, a third reason. Simply to make TIL a bit more visible, and to let me people know that this venerable and honored organization is an important presence with members who are representing the state with their literary contributions.
Darwin Payne
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New Poetry Award To Debut At Spring Banquet
The new TIL award for the first book of poetry, with a prize of $1,000, will be given at the 2011 TIL annual banquet for a work published in 2010. This award has been established as a memorial to Bob Bush, a late attorney from Sherman who served with distinction for ten years in the Texas House of Representatives beginning in 1976. It has been funded initially for five years by Mr. Bush’s widow, Wanda Bush of Sherman.
Bush,
whose full name was Robert G. Bush III, enjoyed writing poetry himself. He
lived from 1936 to 2002. The award will be known as the Bob Bush Memorial Award
for First Book of Poetry. Arrangements for this new award were made by TIL
member and councilor Frances Neidhardt.
TIL Officers
President, Darwin Payne, Dallas, dpayne@smu.edu
Vice President, Fritz Lanham, Houston, fritz.lanham@earthlink.net
Secretary, W.K. (Kip) Stratton, Round Rock, tilsecretary@yahoo.com
Treasurer, James Hoggard, Wichita Falls, james.hoggard@mwsu.edu
Recording Secretary, Betty Wiesepape, Richardson, Betwx@aol.com
TIL Councilors
T.
Lindsay Baker, Rio Vista, first term ends April 2011
Ty
Cashion, Huntsville, second term ends April 2012
Robert
Compton, Garland, first term ends April 2012
Emily
Fox Gordon, Houston, first term ends April 2011
Kate
Lehrer, Washington, D.C., first term ends April 2013
Frances
Neidhardt, Sherman, second term ends April 2012
Jan
Seale, McAllen, second term ends April 2011
Andrés
Tijerina, Austin, second term ends in April 2012
Send news for the next TIL Newsletter to Kip Stratton: mailto:tilsecretary@yahoo.com
2010-11
Dues Form
Please print this form and send it with a check for your 2010-11 dues to the address below.
Name__________________________________________________________________
Address________________________________________________________________
City___________________________ State____________________ Zip ____________
Phone______________________________ Fax ________________________________
E-Mail _____________________________
TIL dues for fiscal year 2010-11 ____________$50.00
Paisano Fund __________________
Fred Whitehead Memorial Endowment Fund __________________
Scholarly Book Award Endowment Fund __________________
O. Henry Award Endowment Fund __________________
Stanley Walker Award Endowment Fund __________________
TOTAL
ENCLOSED __________________
Make check payable to Texas
Institute of Letters and send with
the form to:
James Hoggard, Dept. of English, Midwestern
State University, 3410 Taft, Wichita Falls, TX 76308.