When I was a young father and my daughter Sidney was just a toddler, her mother and I took her to the Lake of the Woods beach. We went with some friends who had a daughter the same age as Sidney. As we approached the water, both girls quickened their pace. Lilly, Sidney’s friend, would stop and turn for a reassuring glance to see her parents were safely watching. Sidney on the other hand broke into a toddler-like-waddle-run headlong for the water. Just as she splashed in knee deep, I caught up with her. Sometimes I regret not letting her go just a little further…
This Thursday night, July 12th at 7pm come see her wade in a little deeper. I’ve always felt her writing to be powerful and her professors at the U of I seem to agree. She is the first student in the creative writing program to win the Thatcher H. Guild Prize for poetry and the John L. Rainey Prize for fiction in the same year (see below). She also was one of two students awarded the 2012 Junior Quinn Prize, a $2,000 scholarship to attend the writing workshop of the students choice. She applied to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst and was one of 90 accepted.
Thatcher H. Guild Prize: Sidney Sheehan, “In the Sick, Remembering”
This poem portrays the drift, yet also the specificity of the sickbed. The speaker’s defenses are lowered by illness as images such as “the old rotary phone–/burnt orange, cracked plastic dial and kinked cord/ stretched to exhaustion” move in and out of altered consciousness. As the poem develops the long lines move associatively through “the old house of fever dreams” sleepily, yet concretely from objects to the speaker’s own infancy, to the lives of her parents in the present and finally the speaker’s present state in a tone both vulnerable and convincing.
Judge: Maxine Scates
Maxine Scates is the author of Undone (New Issues 2011) and two other books of poetry, Black Loam and Toluca Street. She is also co-editor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
John L. Rainey Prize (sponsored by Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity): Sidney Sheehan, “Rock.”
“Rock” astonished me with its devastating beauty–a story told through arresting images that collect like sharp, vivid tintypes, one atop the other. We are shown the poison that assaults each generation, the poison of ignorant words, of weapons and war, and how difficult it is to emerge whole from a legacy of silence. The courageous, enduring women of this story will haunt me for years to come.
Judge: Susan Power
Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and a native Chicagoan. She is a graduate of Harvard College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and the recipient of a James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute fellowship, and Princeton Hodder Fellowship. Her first novel, The Grass Dancer (1994), was awarded the PEN/Hemingway Prize. Her second book, Roofwalker, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2002 and awarded their National Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Story, Voice Literary Supplement, and Best American Short Stories 1993. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.