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RECENT ALUMNI NEWS
The Friends of Writers website provides an extensive account of alumni profiles, news, and publications. Here's just a sampling of recent alumni achievements:
Dilruba Ahmed (poetry '09) has been named a winner of the 2010 15th annual Bakeless Literary Publication Prize for her collection of poetry, Dhaka Dust. Dilruba will receive a fellowship to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in August, 2011 and her book will be published by Graywolf. Her poetry has appeared in Cream City Review, New England Review, New Orleans Review, Drunken Boat, Pebble Lake Review, and Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry.
R. Dwayne Betts (Poetry '10, Holden fellow) has been awarded the 2010 Soros Justice Fellowship and 2010 NAACP Image Award for Literary Debut for his memoir A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison (Penguin/Avery, 2009). The Soros Justice Fellowships fund outstanding individuals to implement innovative projects that advance the efforts of the Open Society Foundations to reform the U.S. criminal justice system. Betts, who is a juvenile justice activist, will write a book about the ways that crime and mass incarceration affect the families of both victims and incarcerated, social workers, teachers, and others who will never see the inside of a jail cell. A frequent lecturer and commentator, Betts was nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the 2007 Ruth Lily Fellowship in Poetry, and was a Cave Canem Fellow in 2006 and 2007.
Matthew Olzmann (Poetry '09) has been named a Kresge Arts Fellow for 2010. Each of the 18 fellowships includes an unrestricted prize of $25,000 rewarding creative vision and commitment to excellence within a wide range of artistic disciplines. This is the second year of the program, and these fellowships are unprecedented awards devoted exclusively to Metropolitan Detroit artists in the tri-county area (Wayne, Oakland and Macomb) and represent the foundation’s unwavering support for artists living and working in its hometown. Detroit’s College for Creative Studies administers the fellowships, and the fellows are also offered customized professional development opportunities by ArtServe Michigan. Matthew's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Salt Hill, Margie, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Kundiman, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Oboh Prize from Boxcar Poetry Review. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist.