AUSTIN, Texas — The winners of the Dobie Paisano writing fellowships for 2000-2001 are Robin Bradford and Craig Arnold. Bradford, a writer of short fiction, is from Austin, and Arnold, a poet, has lived in Temple and Austin and is currently residing in Salt Lake City.
The fellowships, sponsored by The University of Texas at Austin and the Texas Institute of Letters, allow writers to spend six months at Paisano, the late author J. Frank DobieÌs 164-acre retreat west of Austin, now owned and maintained by UT Austin.
Bradford, who will hold the Ralph Johnston Memorial Fellowship, will begin residence at Paisano in September. Arnold will hold the Jesse Jones Writing Fellowship and begin residency at Paisano in March 2001.
Bradford attended Southwest Texas State University, the University of Delaware and Brown University, from which she received an MFA degree in creative writing. She has had residencies at the Yaddo Colony for the Arts in New York and at the Villa Montalvo Arts Colony in California. Her short stories have appeared in a variety of publications including Prize Stories 1995: The O. Henry Awards. Until recently, she served as coordinator of development at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at UT Austin. She currently works as content writer for an Austin dot-com company.
Bradford proposes to complete a collection of short stories, titled If This Were a Beaded Object, and to write new stories for a collection about motherhood.
Arnold was a visiting writer in the English department at UT Austin last fall and was the Thornton Writer-in-Residence at Lynchburg College in Virginia this spring. He was awarded the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship in 1996-97 and held the John Atherton Fellowship in Poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1999. He received his bachelor’s degree at Yale University and expects to finish his Ph.D. in creative writing at the University of Utah this summer.
His poetry has appeared in the Colorado Review, the Yale Review, Poetry, the Paris Review, and The New Republic. ArnoldÌs first book of poetry, Shells, was selected by W.S. Merwin as the 1998 volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (Yale University Press, 1999).
Arnold hopes to complete a book-length poem, tentatively entitled Made Flesh, whose subject, he says, “is, quite simply, joy.” He envisions it as “a song-cycle or rhapsody, a marriage of the classical and the experimental, partly narrative, partly speaking in tongues”.
Vicente Lozano, a poet from Austin, was selected as the runner-up.
Applications for the next Dobie Paisano fellowships will be available after Oct. 1 from Dr. Audrey N. Slate, director, Dobie Paisano Fellowship Project, J. Frank Dobie House, 702 E. Dean Keeton St., Austin, Texas, 78705. Phone: 512-471-8542; E-mail: aslate@mail.utexas.edu. A down-loadable application and information for applicants will be available at http:/www.utexas.edu/ogs/Paisano.pdf after July 1.
The deadline for the 2000-20001 competition will be Jan. 26, 2001.
