September 16, 1998
Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference
Awards 1998 Bakeless Nason Prizes in
Poetry and Fiction
The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference of Middlebury
College has announced the recipients of the third annual Bakeless
Nason Prizes in poetry and fiction for 1998. The prizes, established
in honor of a long-time supporter of Middlebury College, are awarded
to aid and encourage writers who are seeking publication of their
first books. Winners of the Bakeless prize will receive fellowships
to attend Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Judy Doenges’ “What She Left Me: Stories and
a Novella” was chosen by novelist and Bread Loaf faculty
member Richard Bausch for the fiction award. Poet and fellow Bread
Loaf faculty member Ellen Bryant Voigt chose Chris Forhan’s “Forgive
Us Our Happiness” and Dan Tobin’s “Where the World Is
Made” for the poetry prize. Judy Doenges, Chris Forhan and
Dan Tobin’s books will be published in the fall of 1998 by Middlebury
College\University Press of New England.
Judy Doenges, the fiction award winner, is a native
of the Midwest and lives in Tacoma, Wash. She holds an undergraduate
degree in English and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin
and a master’s in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts.
Her work has been published in The Georgia Review, Nimrod, Equinox,
and The Green Mountains Review. She also has been a writer-in-residence
at Headlands Center for the Arts, as well as the Hedgebrook, Ragdale,
and MacDowell artists’ communities, and has received grants from
the Ohio Arts Council and Artist Trust. She is a frequent book
reviewer for The Seattle Times. For the past six years, Doenges
has been a lecturer in English at Pacific Lutheran University.
In Bausch’s award citation for “What She Left
Me: Stories and a Novella,” he described Doenges’ work as
“a wonderfully various, and richly detailed collection of
worlds. Each story quickly establishes its own boundaries and
its own separateness, not just from the other stories in the book,
but in a very real way from all other stories everywhere. As with
anything truly original, one feels as if one has arrived at the
essence of a personality, here. There is a marvelous insistence
in these voices, an urgency that breathes in them, and does not
feel produced or willed. By turns tender, sardonic, wise, sorrowful,
and tough, always precise and emotionally exact, it exemplifies
artful storytelling, this blessed occupation, at its beautifully
honorable best.”
Born in Seattle, Wash., poetry prize winner Chris
Forhan received his undergraduate degree in communications from
Washington State University. After a brief career in television
news, he returned to school, earning a master’s in English from
the University of New Hampshire. His poems have been published
over the last 10 years in Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, The
Greensboro Review, Fine Madness, and other magazines. Since 1989
he has lived with his wife, the painter Rebecca Freeman, in Charleston,
S.C., teaching English at Trident Technical College.
In presenting the Bakeless poetry award to Forhan,
Voigt said, “While many young poets arrive barely hatched
from their apprenticeship cocoons, others simply appear in the
tree, singing, like some new species of bird. Chris Forhan is
that second kind of creature, and the voice in these poems-at
once wry, plaintive, self-chastising, inventive, innocent and
wise-never fails to compel and to surprise. How, why should one
resist such songs?”
Dan Tobin, also the recipient of a Bakeless poetry
prize, grew up in New York City. He earned his bachelor’s of arts
degree in psychology and religion from Iona College, master’s
degrees in theological studies from Harvard University and in
fine arts from Warren Wilson College, and a doctorate in English
literature from the University of Virginia. Tobin attended the
1995 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference as a scholar and has won a
number of literary prizes and fellowships, including a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Discovery Prize, an award
co-sponsored by The Nation magazine and the 92nd Street
Y. His book “Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred
in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney” will be published in October
1998 by the University Press of Kentucky. Tobin is an assistant
professor of English at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis.
Praising Tobin’s poetry, Voigt said, “Poetry
began in story, and Dan Tobin’s poems remind us of that beginning
with its deep connections to ritual and to the tribe. A musical
Bildungsroman, “Where the World Is Made” explores
the seen and unseen, the physical and the metaphysical, in poems
of great clarity, precision, and intelligence. This is a mind
that remains skeptical without being cynical, and a first book
of remarkable authority.”
No award was made in creative nonfiction for 1998.
For more information concerning the Bakeless Nason
Literary Publication Prizes, contact Ian Pounds, Bakeless Prizes,
Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Middlebury College, Middlebury,
VT 05753. (E-mail: BLWC@Middlebury.edu). Complete guidelines for
the 1999 prizes are currently available.