As Big as Texas: More Student Wins

0 Commentsby   |  08.31.11  |  Announcements, Creative Writing

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News of the best variety arrived in Writer in Residence Al Haley’s email in-box last week.

It was notification that two students he had nominated earlier in the summer had placed in their respective genres in the student writing contest sponsored by the Texas Association of Creative Writing Teachers (TACWT). Not second or third, but…

First place.

Tanner Hadfield in fiction.

Bethany Bradshaw in poetry.

This follows on the heels of ACU student wins in the annual Christianity and Literature Student Writing Contest (see post).

First place winners of the TACWT contest receive $100 and an invitation to read their work at TACWT’s annual meeting which this year will be held in Austin, Sept. 23-24.

“This is a wonderful result,” Prof. Haley said. “In TACWT we’re competing with schools that have established MFA and MA programs in creative writing like the University of Houston and Texas Tech.

“Often their undergraduates have worked with the graduate faculty who are numerous and many of whom are much published writers themselves. So for a school like ACU to come along and win two out of three first places makes a kind of statement about the caliber of our classes, teachers, and students.”

Tanner Hadfield’s story, “Snowing in Darling,” is a magic-realism sort of tale that he wrote in Prof. Heidi Nobles Fiction Workshop last fall. Tanner got the news at the University Colorado where he had just begun his first semester as an MFA student.

He wrote back that already he’s taught his first class of undergrads as a graduate teaching assistant, is  working on a novella, staring up an art-zine, judging a poetry contest for Subito Press, and tutoring. And, oh, yes he’s taking classes.

Out on the East Coast the news about her poetry win found Bethany Bradshaw beginning her first semester of classes as an MA student in literature at the University of North Carolina in Raleigh. In her email response she expressed excitement over the outcome and noted, “I am sitting with my books and coffee watching the rain soak our yard full of trees (not to gloat or anything). So yes, I am loving Raleigh.”

Prof. Haley concluded, “Combined with the student work  that place earlier this year in the Christianity and Literature contest, these results show that we have a very good thing going with creative writing at ACU. I encourage any student, regardless of his or her major, to take one of our three workshops. There’s something offered every semester and it’s a chance to meet the challenge to do quality work. And I think that’s what a lot of our students are really looking for. A serious challenge.”

For anyone interested, Eng. 320: Creative Nonfiction Workshop is offered in the Spring; Eng. 322: Fiction Workshop and Eng. 323: Poetry Workshop meet in the Fall.

 

 

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