2011 Mark Fischer Poetry Prize Winners Announced!
Join us for readings and awards on Friday, May 20 at 7pm at The Steaming Bean in Telluride.
Kiersten Bridger 2011 Mark Fischer Poetry Prize Winner
First Place:
by Kiersten Bridger
Second Place:
by N. Colwell Snell
Third Place:
Before Being a Magpie, I Called Out the Muses
by Kathleen Willard
Honorable Mention:
by Carol Beck
Judge’s Special Recognition
by N. Colwell Snell
by Frank Coons
by Cindy Bechtold
THE CELEBRATION
Telluride Arts will host the Mark Fischer Poetry Prize Celebration Friday May 20th @ 7pm @ The Steaming Bean. Winning Poets, our Judge and other Poets will be on hand to read and perform. Donations accepted at the door.
THE JUDGE – Colorado Poet David Feela
David Feela resides in Arriola, Colorado, a small rural community north of Cortez. hear his poems on his You Tube site Feelosophy. Recently retired from a 27 year teaching gig, he has been a former “Colorado Voice” for the Denver Post and worked for over a decade as a contributing editor and columnist at Inside/Outside Southwest magazine. Currently he contributes occasional pieces to High Country News “Writers On the Range” and writes a monthly piece for the Four Corners Free Press. His poetry has appeared in hundreds of regional and national publications. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments (Maverick Press), won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book, The Home Atlas, is now available.
THE WINNERS
Kierstin Bridger lives in Telluride, Colorado. Her published work includes a one act play “Ruminations in the Median” featured in The University of Washington’s literary publication Bricolage and” Girl’s Room” a short story printed in UW Women’s Voices. She has performed her poetry at Sparrows poetry Festival in Salida, Colorado. She has been a featured writer and reader at P-3 (performance, Poetry &Prose) in Salida and at After Long Silence in Seattle, WA. Her most recent work can be found in the Porter Gulch Review, May 2011 issue.
N. Colwell Snell graduated from the University of Utah with a BA in English. He was named the 2007 Utah State Poetry Society Poet of the Year. His manuscript, Hand Me MyShadow won the 2007 Pearle M. Olsen Book Award, the 2007 City Weekly Artys for Best Poetry Collection, and runner-up in the 2007 Utah Center for the Book award. He was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, and his poetry won 1st Runner-up in the 2006 William Faulkner-William Wisdom poetry competition. His poetry has been published in Bay Area Poets’ Coalition, California Quarterly, Comstock Review, Weber the Contemporary West, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City.
Thirty of Kathleen Willard’s poems have been published in literary magazines and anthologies including: Dry Creek Review, Monserrat Review, Flint Hills Review,Matter, Colere, Icarus, Poetry Motel, Landscape and Place, The Teacher’s Voice, Pinyon Poetry (featured poet) and Against Agamemnon. She is a life long student of poetry completing both her MA in Literature from Middlebury College and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. Her awards include a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to travel and write in India, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship to study writers of the New England Renaissance and an Arts Alive Fellowship to travel and write in Turkey. She received a scholarship to attend the Disquiet International Writer’s Conference in Portugal this summer.
Her poetry projects include a travelogue documenting a month long stay in India, an investigation into the life of St. Francis of Assisi inspired by relics and art depicting his life, a mistranslation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis using an early 20th Century high school Latin workbook and documenting her life in northern Colorado. She is at work refining her poetry manuscript titled This Incendiary Season.
