Seneca Review Selects Winner of Inaugural Book Prize
22 January 2018 Seneca Review Selects Winner of Inaugural Book Prize
Erica Trabolds Five Plots is the winner of the inaugural Seneca Review Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize.
What I admire aboutFive Plotsis the complexity with which it grapples with nostalgia both its open celebration of how comforting nostalgia can make us feel as well as its acknowledgement that nostalgia can also mislead us into believing in dangerous fictions, says John DAgata 95, the 2017-18 Trias Writer-in-Residence and judge of this years book prize. And it does all of this through a discussion of the landscape, which is a unique lens through which to examine nostalgia.
Trabold is a Nebraska-born writer whose lyric essays have appeared in The Rumpus, Passages North, The Collagist, South Dakota Review, Seneca Review, Essay Daily and elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State Universitys MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, she writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon.
Five Plots will be published by Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press in the fall of 2018, when Trabold will deliver a reading on campus.
DAgata notes that the books combination of nostalgia and landscape makes me think itll be the perfect inaugural winner of this new Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize, since its namesake explored many of the same issues in her own extraordinary works of nonfiction, such asFrom Where We Stand,A Family of Strangers andThe Island of the White Cow.
Named for the late poet and HWS professor of English, the biennial book series was founded in 2017 to support innovative work in the essay form, includingcross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or related pieces, and/or beyond category projects.
Tall, who taught literature and writing at HWS, was an innovative poet and essayist, and edited Seneca Review, the Colleges national literary journal, from 1982 to 2006. She authored four books of poems and several nonfiction works, and was co-editor with Stephen Kuusisto 78 and Professor of English David Weiss of The Poets Notebook, which originated from a special issue ofSeneca Review. In 1997, Tall and DAgata created what is now known as the lyric essay.
Read the list of finalists, semifinalists and honorable mentions.
Founded in 1970 by Professor Emeritus of English James Crenner and Ira Sadoff, Seneca Review is published twice yearly, spring and fall, by Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press. The magazines emphasis is poetry and experimental nonfiction, and the editors have a special interest in translations of contemporary poetry from around the world. Publisher of numerous laureates and award-winning poets, including Seamus Heaney, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lisel Mueller, Wislawa Szymborska, Charles Simic, W.S. Merwin, Eavan Boland, and Nathaniel Mackey, Seneca Review also consistently publishes emerging writers and is always open to new, innovative work.
In 1997, Seneca Review began publishing the lyric essay, creative nonfiction that borders on poetry, under the associate editorship of DAgata. In that genre, Seneca Review has featured work by Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Fanny Howe, Wayne Koestenbaum, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Honor Moore, Mary Reufle, David Shields, Joe Wenderoth, Terry Tempest Williams, Jenny Boully, and many others.
Individual issues and subscriptions can be purchased online throughthe College Store.
The submissions period for the next Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize will begin in the summer of 2019.