PENELOPE SCHWARTZ ROBINSON WINS FIRST STONECOAST BOOK PRIZE

tonecoast MFA alum receives first Stonecoast Book Prize
Contact E-mail: alum@usm.maine.edu

 Finalist judge Katha Pollitt chose Penelope Schwartz Robinson’s essay collection Slippery Men for the award sponsored jointly by New Rivers Press, a teaching press at Minnesota State University, Morehead and the Stonecoast M.F.A., a low-residency creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine, Portland. Robinson, a 2004 Stonecoast graduate in Creative Nonfiction, receives a $1,000 honorarium and a standard publishing contract with New Rivers Press. Slippery Men will be published and distributed nationally in the fall of 2008. Katha Pollitt will be attending the Stonecoast MFA winter residency at the Stone House in Freeport, where Penelope will officially be presented with the award. They will conduct a joint reading there on January 11, 2008.

Penelope’s work has appeared in Ascent, Willow Springs, Fourth Genre, and River Teeth, among others. She received an AWP Intro Journals Award in Nonfiction in 2004 for her essay “All Hands.” Another essay, “Lofting,” was recognized by the editors of Best American Essays as being Notable in 2005. She has been a feature columnist for The Portland Press Herald, and her spoken essays have aired on Maine Public Radio. She is a founding member of Three Genres in the Rain, a group of four writers from the Stonecoast MFA program who present readings of their work to benefit libraries around New England. For more than twenty years, Penelope has been a member of the Saturday Morning Club, a women’s writing group in Cambridge, Massachusetts founded by Julia Ward Howe, whose papers are presented at the Harvard Club of Boston and collected and stored in the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliff Institute.

Penelope teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Maine, Farmington.

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