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MFA wins Rona Jaffe Foundation Award
We are pleased to announce that University of Michigan Poet VIEVEE FRANCIS will receive a 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, which is given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Celebrating its 15th year, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time. The Awards of $25,000 each will be presented to the six recipients on September 24th in New York City.
Vievee Francis lives in Detroit, Michigan (Hamtramck), where for 15 years she has been instrumental in fostering a literary community for youth and young-adult poets. She received her B.A. from Fisk University and will receive her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 2009, where she is the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program Poet-in- Residence. Her first collection of poems, BLUE-TAIL FLY (Wayne State University Press, 2006), is described by her nominator as a "remarkably compassionate and clear-eyed debut that is a masterly poetic sequence rooted in mid-19th-century American voices and history. It is confident and utterly compelling." Her poems have also appeared in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, and in the forthcoming Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets. She was a Cave Canem Fellow in 2005 and 2007. Next year, with the help of her Rona Jaffe Award, she will delay full-time employment in order to complete the research for her new collection of poems on the Wendish region of Texas (Texas Hill Country), where her family has lived since the 1800s when the slave holding region was settled by German immigrants seeking religious freedom. She says, "Frankly, it took years for me to find the inner strength to approach the lyric poem from this close a distance, and now that I have I feel on fire to write, write, write, to follow my voice wherever it takes me."
Celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards program in 1995. It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively. Since the program began, the Foundation has awarded more than $1 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, Rebecca Curtis, Rivka Galchen, Frances Hwang, Aryn Kyle, ZZ Packer, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Julia Whitty.
http://www.ronajaffefoundation.org
