» Beyond the Pure Fellowships for Writers
ANYA ACHTENBERG, an award-winning fiction writer as well as poet, has seen her recently completed novel, Prairie Angel, excerpted in Harvard Review under the title More Than The Wind, and her novella The Stories of Devil-Girl published by Modern History Press as well as released on CD. Her second book of poetry, The Stone of Language, was published in 2004 by West End Press (Albuquerque) after being finalist in 5 poetry competitions. Her stories have received awards from Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Writers Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others. Her first book of poetry, I Know What the Small Girl Knew, was published by Holy Cow! Press (MN). She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in the experience of a Cambodian woman born of an African American father at the moment the bombing of Cambodia by U.S. forces began. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist’s Initiative Grant to work on it in 2008. She has taught creative writing widely, including at New York University, School of Visual Arts in NY, Springfield College Boston, Hamline University, the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, the University of New Mexico’s Honors Program, and their summer conference in Taos; for organizations such as The International Women’s Writing Guild—at their yearly conference at Skidmore, at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Cottage in Hyde Park, NY, and at the Santa Fe Women’s Club; at the Center for Contemporary Arts and for Word Harvest in Santa Fe; The Leaven Center—for the bringing together of the political and the spiritual, in Michigan; The Loft in Minnesota; and with drop-out youth, working adults, and through residencies in Minnesota and New York City public schools. She spent years writing curriculum for young people in and out of the public schools. She currently teaches writer’s workshops and classes throughout the country on deepening characterization, the essential elements of story, autobiography and autobiographical fiction, and is the founder and author of Writing for Social Change:Re-Dream a Just World, a series of multi-genre workshops on writing for social change. She also offers manuscript consultations for fiction writers, poets, essayists and memoirists. Her private clients include a wide range of people geographically, professionally, and in terms of content, genre, and style; clients and former clients are publishing books, stories, essays and poems; winning prizes; completing novels and memoirs; studying in and graduating from MFA programs; and banishing writer’s block.
DAVID MURA is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Grove-Atlantic), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor/Random). His most recent work is the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (2008, Coffee House Press), a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award. Mura’s third book of poetry is Angels for the Burning (2004, Boa Editions Ltd.). His second, The Colors of Desire (1995, Anchor), won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way (Carnegie Mellon U. Press), won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. He wrote a chapbook, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography & Addiction (Milkweed Editions). His critical essays, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity, were published in the U. of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series (2002). Along with African American writer Alexs Pate, Mura has created and performs a multi-media performance piece, Secret Colors, about their lives as men of color and Asian American-African American relations. A film adaptation of this piece, Slowly, This, was broadcast in the PBS series ALIVE TV in July/August 1995. Mura has also been featured on the Bill Moyers PBS series, The Language of Life. Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers’ Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award.
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ANYA ACHTENBERG, an award-winning fiction writer as well as poet, has seen her recently completed novel, Prairie Angel, excerpted in Harvard Review under the title More Than The Wind, and her novella The Stories of Devil-Girl published by Modern History Press as well as released on CD. Her second book of poetry, The Stone of Language, was published in 2004 by West End Press (Albuquerque) after being finalist in 5 poetry competitions. Her stories have received awards from Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, the Asheville Fiction Writers Workshop, the Raymond Carver Story Contest, and others. Her first book of poetry, I Know What the Small Girl Knew, was published by Holy Cow! Press (MN). She is at work on History Artist, a novel centering in the experience of a Cambodian woman born of an African American father at the moment the bombing of Cambodia by U.S. forces began. She received a Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist’s Initiative Grant to work on it in 2008. She has taught creative writing widely, including at New York University, School of Visual Arts in NY, Springfield College Boston, Hamline University, the University of Minnesota’s Split Rock Arts Program, the University of New Mexico’s Honors Program, and their summer conference in Taos; for organizations such as The International Women’s Writing Guild—at their yearly conference at Skidmore, at Scandinavia House in Manhattan, at Eleanor Roosevelt’s Cottage in Hyde Park, NY, and at the Santa Fe Women’s Club; at the Center for Contemporary Arts and for Word Harvest in Santa Fe; The Leaven Center—for the bringing together of the political and the spiritual, in Michigan; The Loft in Minnesota; and with drop-out youth, working adults, and through residencies in Minnesota and New York City public schools. She spent years writing curriculum for young people in and out of the public schools. She currently teaches writer’s workshops and classes throughout the country on deepening characterization, the essential elements of story, autobiography and autobiographical fiction, and is the founder and author of Writing for Social Change:Re-Dream a Just World, a series of multi-genre workshops on writing for social change. She also offers manuscript consultations for fiction writers, poets, essayists and memoirists. Her private clients include a wide range of people geographically, professionally, and in terms of content, genre, and style; clients and former clients are publishing books, stories, essays and poems; winning prizes; completing novels and memoirs; studying in and graduating from MFA programs; and banishing writer’s block.DAVID MURA is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Grove-Atlantic), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor/Random). His most recent work is the novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (2008, Coffee House Press), a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award. Mura’s third book of poetry is Angels for the Burning (2004, Boa Editions Ltd.). His second, The Colors of Desire (1995, Anchor), won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library. His first, After We Lost Our Way (Carnegie Mellon U. Press), won the 1989 National Poetry Series Contest. He wrote a chapbook, A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography & Addiction (Milkweed Editions). His critical essays, Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity, were published in the U. of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series (2002). Along with African American writer Alexs Pate, Mura has created and performs a multi-media performance piece, Secret Colors, about their lives as men of color and Asian American-African American relations. A film adaptation of this piece, Slowly, This, was broadcast in the PBS series ALIVE TV in July/August 1995. Mura has also been featured on the Bill Moyers PBS series, The Language of Life. Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers’ Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award.