2011 Prairie Schooner Book Prize winners announced: $6,000 awarded

Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has announced the winners for its annual awards for books of short fiction and poetry. The winners were chosen from almost 1,000 submissions from around the world.

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2011 goes to Karen Brown for her manuscript, "Leaf House." She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Her first collection of short stories, "Pins and Needles," was the recipient of The Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her stories have been chosen twice for inclusion in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, appeared in Best American Short Stories 2008, Good Housekeeping, and in literary journals that include Epoch, The Georgia Review, American Short Fiction, New Ohio Review, Freight Stories, TriQuarterly and Five Points, among others. A native of Connecticut, she studied creative writing at Cornell University and received her Ph.D. in English with a concentration in literature from the University of South Florida in Tampa, where she teaches.

The winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2011 is Susan Blackwell Ramsey for her manuscript, "A Mind Like This." She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Ramsey was born in Detroit, received her bachelor's from Kalamazoo College, and has lived in Kalamazoo most of her life. She taught high school, gardened for hire, and worked as a horticultural transparencies librarian, but has primarily been a bookseller. While she and her husband, Wayne, raised three children, she worked at Kalamazoo's oldest independent bookstore and began publishing poems, receiving an Irving S. Gilmore Emerging Artist Grant. When the book shop closed, she was admitted into the University of Notre Dame's Creative Writing MFA program, where she was given the department's Mitchell Award. Her work appeared in "Wayne State University's New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry," in 2006 she won the Marjorie J. Wilson Award from Margie: The Journal of American Poetry, and David Wagoner chose her "Pickled Heads, St. Petersburg" for the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry. She teaches spinning, knitting, and creative writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

The competition, in its ninth year, runs Jan. 15 to March 15 annually. Submission details and a list of past winners are available online at http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/prizes/index.html.

Founded in 1927, Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at UNL. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews by beginning, mid-career and established writers. For more information, visit http://prairieschooner.unl.edu.

WRITER: Marianne Kunkel