Summer Residency Program

2012 Residents

Congratulations to our 2011 residents: 
Genine Lentine (Poetry)
Harrison C. Fletcher (Prose)

Genine and Harrison will each be staying at the Poetry Center for a two to four week stint, writing, researching, and discovering Tucson. After great consideration, the Summer Residency Committee—which included Alison Deming, Simmons Buntin, Bonnie Jean Michalski, and Matt Mendez—decided on these two fine writers. For more information on our 2012 Summer Residents, see below, which includes a short bio and an excerpt of their work. 

Genine Lentine

Genine Lentine is the author of Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes and Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model, and co-author, with Stanley Kunitz of The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden.  She received a 2012 Southern Exposure Alternative Exposure grant for Mattress Talks:  Six Artists Discuss Discomfort, a series of interviews to take place in 2012. Recent work appears in Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, and Conversations at the Wartime Café, Ninth Letter, Shambhala Sun, and Shareable.net. She received an M.S. in Theoretical Linguistics from Georgetown University and an M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University. She teaches privately, and conducts an ongoing Sunday Writing Studio at San Francisco Zen Center.  She is a 2012 Lucas Literary Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center.

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is author of Descanso For My Father: Fragments Of A Life,
part of the University of Nebraska Press American Lives Series edited by Tobias Wolff. His
work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies including New Letters, Fourth
Genre and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, which selected his
essay, “Beautiful City of Tirzah,” as among fifty outstanding works since 1970. He is a New
Letters Literary Award winner, five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and finalist for the National
Magazine Award, PEN Center USA and Bakeless Literary Prize. He is also founding editor of
Shadowbox magazine and teaches creative writing at Regis University’s Master of Arts Program,
the University of Denver’s University College and Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver.
Visit his website at www.harrisoncandelariafletcher.com 

 “A Loving Wind”
(Excerpt)
 
 
My grandfather, Carlos, heard the call of the road. Orphaned at eight, he ran away from a Santa Fe boarding school to seek the shelter of a mountain cave near Marquez. In the Twenties, he hopped boxcars. During the Depression, he drove produce wagons to the Dust Bowl ranchers of the Rio Puerco. Tall, silent, with a face carved of cottonwood, he came alive whenever his powder blue pickup rolled through the buckskin plains of New Mexico, eyes shining like stream pebbles, riding shimmering currents of memory.
A few months before he died in November 1989, he visited my mother’s Albuquerque house for supper. As she prepared his favorite red chile enchiladas, he leaned in the threshold of her kitchen gripping his gray fedora. “Listen,” he said.
 A week earlier he’d been sitting at his own kitchen table when he became dizzy and blacked out. All at once, he felt arms take hold of him. Lift him. Then he was driving. Gripping the wheel of his F-150 through a valley of apricot trees, alfalfa fields, adobe homes and barbed wire fences. Tires hummed beneath him. Sunlight flashed through a crack in his windshield. At that moment, he felt a warmth wash over him. “I don’t know how to say it,” he told my mother. “Un viento amoroso. A loving wind.”
 
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New Guidelines

Check back for the 2013 deadline.

Since 1994, the Poetry Center’s Residency Program has offered emerging poets, fiction and non-fiction writers an opportunity to develop their work.

We’re pleased to announce changes to the summer residency program which allow us to enhance the services we provide writers and to deepen the Tucson community’s engagement with residents during their stay. Below is a description of our new offerings.

The Poetry Center awards two residencies each summer to one poet and one prose writer to spend two to four weeks in Tucson, Arizona developing his/her work. Writers at any stage of their careers may apply; emerging writers are welcome. The residency includes a $150 stipend per week and a two to four week stay in a studio apartment located within steps of the Center’s renowned library of contemporary poetry. The residency is offered between June 1 and August 31.

Interested parties are asked to complete the application below, which includes a project proposal. All project proposals will be considered; however, the committee is especially interested in projects that make use of the Center’s library collection.

Applications are reviewed by a committee of poets and prose writers comprising UA faculty, Poetry Center staff, and local writers. This is not a blind submission process! Committee members are asked to acknowledge any conflict of interest and not invite friends, students, or family members to apply. University of Arizona faculty, staff, students, and Tucson residents are not eligible to receive the Fellowship. International applicants are welcome.

Submission packets should include THREE copies of each of the following:

• A resume or CV.
• A project proposal, no longer than 3 pages, outlining the kind of work you plan to undertake during your residency.
• Work sample. No more than 10 pages of poetry or 20 pages of fiction or literary non-fiction. Manuscripts should be typed on white, letter-sized paper using 12 pt font.

Reading fee: $20 (only one check necessary). Checks should be made payable to The University of Arizona Poetry Center. Reading fees are not tax-deductable and go to support the cost of the program.

Send submissions to:

University of Arizona Summer Residency Program
University of Arizona Poetry Center
1508 E Helen Street
Tucson, AZ 85721-0150.

Manuscripts will not be returned. Notification of awards will be made by email. No SASE is necessary.

Past Residents

2011: Harmony Holiday (poetry) & Mary Jones (fiction)
2010: Sean Bernard
2009: James Allen Hall
2008: Shashi Baat
2007: Anna Green
2006: Cody Walker
2005: Eric Abbott
2004: Naomi Alderman
2003: Esther Lee
2002: Rebecca Davidson
2001: Joshua Poteat
2000: Jonathon Keats
1999: Beth Ann Fennelly
1998: Martha Silano
1997: Caroline Langston
1996: Lise Goett
1995: Kymberly Taylor
1994: Mark Wunderlich