Madeleine Wattenberg, MFA ’17, was named a finalist for the 2021 Miller Williams Poetry Prize for her collection I/O, which will be published by the University of Arkansas Press next year. And MFA professor Eric Pankey has won the 2020 Snowbound Chapbook Award for his manuscript The Future Perfect: A Fugue—an honor which includes a $1000 prize as well as publication by Tupelo Press.
I/O will be Wattenburg's first published collection; an earlier version of the manuscript was her MFA thesis at Mason. Her poetry has appeared in The Rumpus, Puerto del Sol, sixth finch, DIAGRAM, Ninth Letter, Guernica, and Best New Poets. Wattenburg is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati.
Writing about Pankey's manuscript, judge John Yao wrote: "I am stunned, delighted, and moved by the seamless merging of meaning and music that unfolds throughout The Future Perfect: A Fugue. Whether made up of one sentence or a dozen, each section of this long, single work stands on its own, as self-sufficient as a painting in a museum, while contributing to the whole masterful gathering."
Pankey is the author of twelve collections of poems and most recently a collection of essays, Vestiges (Parlor Press 2019).
Congratulations to both!
June 16, 2020
