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.