Oliver Baez Bendorf, Leila Chatti, Tia Clark, Tiana Clark, Marta Evans

press release:

APRIL 5, 7PM, MADISON PUBLIC LIBRARY’S COMMUNITY ROOM (201 W MIFFLIN), The UW Program in Creative Writing presents 2017-18 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Poetry & Fiction Fellows Oliver Baez Bendorf, Leila Chatti, Tia Clark, Tiana Clark, & Marta Evans.

Please join UW-Madison’s Program in Creative Writing for its annual reading featuring the WICW Fellows in Fiction and Poetry: Oliver Baez Bendorf, Leila Chatti, Tia Clark, Tiana Clark, and Marta Evans. The reading will take place this Thursday, April 5 in room 302 of the Madison Public Library. Help us spread the word on Facebook!.

Each year, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing receives more than a thousand applications from poets, novelists, and short story writers all over the world, each working to complete a first or second book. Just five of those applicants are then selected to receive a generous stipend, office space, and a year to write in Madison. These writers are some of the most promising emerging authors in the world, and we are excited to introduce Madison to their work. Read all about this year’s fellows, below.

OLIVER BAEZ BENDORF is the 2017-18 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow. His first book, The Spectral Wilderness, won the Wick Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has been anthologized in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and translated into Russian. New poems are forthcoming from American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, and West Branch. This fall, he joins Kalamazoo College in Michigan as Assistant Professor of Poetry.

LEILA CHATTI is the 2017-18 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow. She is a Tunisian-American poet and author of the chapbooks Ebb (Akashic Books, New-Generation African Poets Series) and Tunsiya/Amrikiya, the 2017 Editors’ Selection from Bull City Press. She is the recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, prizes from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, Narrative’s 30 Below Contest, and the Academy of American Poets, and fellowships and scholarships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, the Key West Literary Seminar, and Dickinson House. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, Narrative, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.

TIA CLARK is the 2017-18 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow. Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, The Offing, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. She has held residencies at the Omi International Arts Center and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

TIANA CLARK is the 2017-18 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow. Her first full-length collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2018), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook Equilibrium. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, New England Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

MARTA EVANS is the 2017-18 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow. Her stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Joyland, Fence, and Tin House Flash Fridays. She was a scholarship recipient at Squaw Valley Community of Writers and her work was included in the Wigleaf Top 50 Short Fictions of 2016.