Faculty Member in Ashland University’s MFA Program Runner-Up for Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Ashland, OH, April 16, 2010 --(PR.com)-- Angie Estes, a core poetry faculty member in Ashland University’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA) program, has been named runner-up for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her poetry collection, “Tryst.”

Dr. Stephen Haven, director of the MFA program, said Estes, who was hired at Ashland University in the spring of 2008 during the first year of the MFA program, teaches year round in the program.

“She has been very much a part of the MFA program from the start and we are extremely happy for her,” Haven said. “A review of her book came out in the New York Times during the residency last summer. It was a highly favorable review and we were able to celebrate the success with her. We are absolutely delighted now to have further cause to celebrate Angie as a writer. She is a wonderful teacher and a great human being.”

The announcement of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry winners was made on Monday in the New York Times. Rae Armantrout’s ninth volume of poetry titled “Versed” won the top award, while Lucia Perillo’s “Inseminating the Elephant” was also a runner-up.

Estes is the author of four books, most recently “Tryst” (2009) and “Chez Nous” (2005), both from Oberlin College Press. Her second book, “Voice-Over” (Oberlin College Press, 2002), won the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize and was also awarded the 2001 Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her first book, “The Uses of Passion” (1995), was the winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines, including TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Boston Review and Slate, and in the anthologies Gondola Signore Gondola: Venice in 20th Century American Poetry (Supernova Edizioni, Venezia, 2007), Evensong: Contemporary American Poets on Spirituality (Bottom Dog Press, 2006), The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press, 2001), and The Geography of Home: California and the Poetry of Place (Heyday Press, 1999). Her essays have appeared in FIELD, Lyric Poetry Review, Children’s Literature, Christianity and Literature, Little Women: Norton Critical Edition, and in Poets on the Psalms.

The recipient of many awards, including a Pushcart Prize and the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has received fellowships, grants and residencies from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the California Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Ohio Arts Council.

Estes received her Ph.D. and M.A. in English from the University of Oregon and was for several years professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She also taught creative writing at Oberlin College and at The Ohio State University. She is also a contributing editor for the literary magazine The Journal.

Ashland University offers the only two-genre, low-residency Master of Fine Arts program in the country. Ashland’s program is unique because it provides a sharper focus on poets and nonfiction writers exclusively. The cross-genre option – the option of studying for one non-residential semester outside of a primary genre – offers a further opportunity to deepen an understanding of the interrelationship between poetry and creative nonfiction.

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