Chautauqua, the literary journal of Chautauqua Institution, has nominated six contributors featured in Chautauqua 14: Invention and Discovery for the Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series has been published once a year since 1976.
Robert Kirvel receives the nomination for his essay, “A Bomb in the Final Essay by Oliver Sacks,” which won the Chautauqua Editors Prize. Kirvel is a Best of the Net nominee for fiction, 2016 winner of the Fulton Prize for the Short Story, and a 2015 ArtPrize winner for creative nonfiction. He has published stories or essays in the UK, New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in a score of US literary journals, such as Arts & Letters.
George Drew’s poem, “Prayer on the Line of Scrimmage” was first runner-up in the Editors Prize. He is the author of The View from Jackass Hill, 2010 winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize awarded by Texas Review Press, which also published Down & Dirty (2015), and his new and selected, Pastoral Habits, in 2016. His eighth collection, Fancy’s Orphan(Tiger Bark Press), came out in January 2017. He is the winner of the 2014 St. Petersburg Review poetry contest.
Dan Roche was second runner-up with his essay, “Emptying Eddie’s Garage.” Roche has published two memoirs, Great Expectation: A Father’s Diary (Iowa, 2008) and Love’s Labors (Riverhead, 1999), and essays in the North American Review, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, The Journal, Under the Sun, Passages North, and other places. He’s been a fellow in nonfiction literature with the New York Foundation for the Arts, and he teaches nonfiction writing, journalism, and photography at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York.
Elizabeth Burton is nominated for her story, “Creakings.” She is an award-winning fiction writer from Lexington, Kentucky. Her short stories have appeared in Waypoints, Kentucky Review, and Roanoke Review. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Texas (English) and Stony Brook University (linguistics) and is studying fiction in Spalding University’s MFA program.
Johnson Cheu is nominated for his poem, “Mother, Sewing.” His poetry and essays have appeared in Family Matters: Poems of our Families, Screaming Monkeys: Critiques of Asian American Images, and Staring Back: The Disability Experience from the Inside Out. He served as the inaugural fiction/poetry editor of Disability Studies Quarterly, and he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric and American Cultures at Michigan State University.
Doug Ramspeck is nominated for his poem “Roadside Glass.” He is the author of five poetry collections, and his most recent book, Original Bodies (Southern Indiana Review Press), was selected for the Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Two of his earlier books, Mechanical Fireflies and Black Tupelo Country, have also received awards. Individual poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Slate, the Southern Review, and the Georgia Review.
Supported by Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua is produced in partnership with the Department of Creative Writing and the Publishing Laboratory at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Each year a group of graduate and undergraduate students work as members of the editorial team. They read and discuss submissions, fact check and edit, search for art, and participate in the artistic process of building a book. Chautauqua is released each year in June as the Chautauqua Institution’s summer season begins.
Chautauqua Institution is a community on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in southwestern New York state that comes alive each summer with a unique mix of fine and performing arts, lectures, interfaith worship and programs, and recreational activities. Anchored by the historic Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle, founded in 1878, Chautauqua’s literary arts programming includes summer-long interaction of published and aspiring writers at the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, the intensive workshops of the nationally recognized Chautauqua Writers’ Festival, and lectures by prominent authors on the craft and art of writing. Learn more at chq.org/season/literary-arts.