The Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and The Rona Jaffe Foundation are pleased to announce The Rona Jaffe Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Creative Writing. The fellowship will cover two consecutive semesters’ tuition and the fees for two residencies, plus a generous stipend to cover books, travel to residencies, child care, or loss of income while attending each residency.

The Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend is an award given to support a graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers who is completing his/her first book. The Levis Stipend alternates between awards for poetry and for fiction and the 2011 award will be made to a fiction writer in the amount of $10,000. The current judge, a nationally-recognized fiction writer, will be announced at the time the award is made, in January 2011.

“What I end up loving most about these spare, intense poems, is their heart, their urgent, nutty, burning, utterly whole heart," Thomas Lux says about Johnson’s debut collection of poems. During his time at Warren Wilson, Johnson worked with poetry faculty Chris Forhan who interviews him here about how the past, wilderness and the unexpected work in his poetry.

Many of the poems in How to Catch a Falling Knife are about childhood, and I’m drawn to their urgent, obsessive quality; the voice of these poems is often mesmerizing, perhaps mesmerized. William Wordsworth famously called poetry “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Do you think of your poems as recollecting your past, exactly, or are they doing something more like discovering it or redefining it or haunting it, or something else?

I remember climbing a radio tower, hundreds of feet high, near my house when I was a child. The perspective on the world I knew so intimately– the railroad tracks, my elementary school, the gulch where we smashed bottles, the only house in the neighborhood with a swimming pool– shifted pretty radically. Sweaty-palmed and wide-eyed, I kept my bearings but just barely.

Warren Wilson alum Tatjana Soli (fiction ’06) is receiving glowing reviews for her debut novel The Lotus Eaters, out this month from St. Martin’s Press.

A New York Times rave calls it “mesmerizing” and compares its feverish viscerality to “The Hurt Locker.” The following excerpt from The Lotus Eaters introduces the protaganist, an American female combat photographer in the Vietnam War.

April 28, 1975

The city teetered in a dream state. Helen walked down the deserted street. The quiet was eerie. Time running out. A long-handled barber’s razor, cradled in the nest of its strop, lay on the ground, the blade’s metal grabbing the sun. Unable to resist, she leaned down to pick it up, afraid someone would split his foot open running across it. A crashing noise down the street distracted her — dogs overturning garbage cans — and she snatched blindly at the razor. Drawing her hand back, a bright pinprick of blood swelling on her finger. She cursed at her stupidity and kicked the razor, strop and all, to the side of the road and hurried on

The unnatural silence allowed Helen to hear the wailing of the girl. The child’s howl was high and breathless, defiant, rising, alone and forlorn against the buildings, threading its way through the air, a long, plaintive note spreading its complaint. Helen crossed the alley and went around a corner to see a small child of three or four, hard to tell with the unrelenting malnourishment, standing against the padlocked doorway of a bar. Her face and hair drenched with the effort of her crying. She wore a dirty yellow cotton shirt sizes too large, bottom bare, no shoes. Dirt circled between her toes.

The stories of Robin Black (fiction '05) that you may have read long ago in a tattered fiction binder, under blinking Sunderland fluorescent lights, are now living in a beautiful hardcover collection just out from Random House, If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This. The Louisville Courier-Journal called it "A wonderfully rich and rewarding story collection by a debut writer that's not to miss for fans of Alice Munro or Lorrie Moore."

Robin Black worked with Steven Schwartz, CJ Hribal, Kevin 'Mc' McIlovy and Roger King at Warren Wilson, and we asked fiction faculty Steven Schwartz to dig up her old letters and see how many of his suggestions she took to heart.

In looking back at our early correspondence, I see that I wrote to you that your writing shines with intelligence; your dialogue is not only convincing but sophisticated; and your stories have a strong emotional current that makes them both readable and resonant. But then I added: “There’s the point of view stuff.” Does point of view still present a challenge? Has it become easier to work through?

Victor LaValle was having one of those days you have when you’re remodeling. He had to call the electrician whose crew dropped plaster in his bathroom sink, which caused it to back up and overflow into the neighbor’s apartment downstairs. Victor took some time between calls to talk with former student Larry Bingham (fiction ’06) about other topics — mental wards, defensiveness, and Victor’s recently published third book Big Machine, which has been named a Best Book of 2009 by Publishers Weekly, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

All the toil and trouble that Warren Wilson alumna Cynthia Reeves (fiction ’06) put into her thesis has paid off: Miami University Press recently published her novella Badlands, drawn largely on writing she did during the MFA program. The Asheville alternative weekly Mountain Xpress admires how “Reeves writes of loss in sharply gorgeous language with no measures taken to spare the reader from life’s cruelest moments” and the Potomac Review calls it “an experimental work that is compassionate and abstains from sentimentality.”

Samantha Hunt discusses her electric new novel

Samantha Hunt (fiction '99) met her husband Joe Hagan (MFA office assistant ’03-’04) through the Warren Wilson MFA program, so we thought we'd let Joe interview her about her much-praised historical novel The Invention of Everything Else. During her time at Warren Wilson, Hunt worked with Ehud Havazelet, Debra Spark, Chuck Wachtel, David Shields and Michael Martone; if you didn’t overlap with Hunt’s five semesters of school, you may have run into her at the 20th year MFA reunion in Swannanoa. Hunt's novel reimagines the life of eccentric scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of electricity as we know it (not Thomas Edison, folks!) and let's just say that when a husband is unleashed on his wife for a newsletter interview, sparks fly...

One of the pleasures of the Warren Wilson program is having new faces at each residency. Two recent additions to the diverse MFA teaching faculty are fiction writers Stacey D’Erasmo and Murad Kalam. Stacey has had journalism published in the New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, and is the author of two novels, Tea and A Seahorse Year. Murad graduated from Harvard Law School and is a practicing attorney, and author of the novel Night Journey.

Jynne Martin (poetry ’06) asked D’Erasmo and Kalam why they would ever return to dorm living and how their dance floor skills are coming along…

A former student asks Charlie about Communists and catalysts

If you ask, fiction faculty Charles Baxter will tell you that his new novel The Soul Thief is about "crazy love versus domestic, ordinary love." Baxter's handling of love and fixation in The Soul Thief has already earned this praise from the Seattle Post Intelligencer: "Few American writers handle those compelling subjects with a more sure touch or more worthy insight." And The New York Times Book Review calls it “gloriously done.” One of Baxter's former WW MFA students Jason Githens (fiction '07) interrogated Baxter about why he didn't quit writing and why he refuses to use Microsoft products.