From the press release:

This past week, the recipients learned by a phone call out of the blue from the Foundation that they will each receive $500,000 in “no strings attached” support over the next five years. MacArthur Fellowships come without stipulations and reporting requirements and offer Fellows unprecedented freedom and opportunity to reflect, create, and explore. The unusual level of independence afforded to Fellows underscores the spirit of freedom intrinsic to creative endeavors. The work of MacArthur Fellows knows neither boundaries nor the constraints of age, place, and endeavor.

Thanks to the blog poesy galore for the tip.

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Congratualtions to Carrie Fountain, who we’ve published in 32 Poems. She won the National Poetry Series. Her book will be published by Penguin.

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Amit Majmudar’s first book is being published by Northwestern University Press. More soon on this book.

No Tell Motel

Visit and read poems.
Here’s what No Tell Motel magazine has to say for themselves:

“Having it all” keeps us awfully busy so we like to stop and “smell the posies,” spend quality time with our poets, which is why our rendezvous last a full seven days – a new poem each weekday. Each year we’ll slip our room key to 52 poets and indulge in 260 poems. Our spouses’ misfortunes are your gains. Meet with us daily at the No Tell Motel. We’ll be in room 5C, sipping the latest cocktail recommended in Martha Stewart’s Living, scribbling marginalia.

In Barn Owl: John Gallaher, Karen Weyant, Alison Pelegrin, Greg McBride, Erika Meitner and myself to name but a few.

Photo above borrowed from Mary Biddinger’s blog.

Worried how you’ll cram all the books you plan to buy into the one suitcase you’ll be forced to drag on board the plane? Of course, you could check your suitcase if you haven’t flown Southwest and want to spend an extra $15 to $25 per bag.

We thought we’d help you out this year. We thought we’d lighten the load. We’re offering you a digital copy of our most recent issue in PDF format. We’ll email it to you after your arrival home. You have no additional weight to carry! No more hard decisions in the hotel room as you attempt to re-pack your bag, which is filled to the brim with books.

Stop by SW Hall 684 at the Hilton and sign up to receive your free issue!

In more good news, I received a Mid Atlantic Arts Fellowship to cover my travel expenses to the VCCA as well as the expense of my stay.

At the VCCA one afternoon, I walked up to the campus of the school to use a printer. I did not have a car or bike with me. I took a shortcut, and there my problems began. I managed to jump a creek with slimy banks and then crawl over a barbed wire fence unscathed…until I landed on a rock and twisted my ankle. Oh, the pain! I was nowhere near a human, a road, or a house.

Only a cow could help me, and she was no help.

What I had not noticed when I started on this “shortcut” is that a thick thorny patch of bushes stood between me and the open field that would lead to the campus hotel. Using all my powers of creativity, I managed a creative passage through these scratchy bushes and hopped and limped my way across the hay-colored field to the hotel. The desk attendant called me a taxi — just a man’s car with a magnetic sign on the side — and he told me to put heat on the ankle. That is the worst advice I’ve ever received.

At dinner — a person who can now pretty much ask me for anything he needs but never does — lent me a contraption that kept my ankle iced down all night long. The pain was so bad that I felt nauseous, and this same person gave me some of his meds.

Since health insurance did not cover crutches — you have to love a doctor who tells you to stay off the ankle when there are no other options besides walking or hopping to my car after the appointment — so I borrowed crutches from the Federal Government agency where I worked. This was a co-worker’s clever idea. The only crutches they had left in the infirmary were different sizes, but it meant I could hoof it the one block to the bathroom inside the cavernous office building. Even getting to the cafeteria meant two blocks of walking.

When I graduated to a cane, people looked at me with such concern. While I thought I looked dapper (ha) they thought they might catch something from me.

Now, I always take a car.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The University of Iowa has backtracked on a plan to post all graduate students’ theses online and make them freely available to the public. The reversal came in response to vigorous protests last week from students in the university’s prestigious graduate program in writing, who said that the plan could threaten the commercial value of their novels, plays, and other creative works.

Lola L. Lopes, the interim provost of the university, announced on Monday that the institution won’t publish theses from students in the writing programs as open-access documents. The decision affects students who will earn master-of-fine-arts degrees in Iowa’s wide-ranging graduate writing concentrations in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, and translation.

“It was only a germ of a thought to begin with,” Ms. Lopes said in an interview. “And we have squelched it.”

And Robert Hass has a new book.