Bruce Arlen Wasserman’s (W) poem “From Rechavia” won the second place Anna Davidson Rosenberg 2019 Poetry Award from Poetica magazine. The poem takes a dive into the hills and alleys, the flora and sacred spaces, the bullet pockmarks and emergent life that rises in Jerusalem.
James Curry’s (F) documentary MASTERJAM screened in the Long Form Documentary competition and won two awards at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) SuperRegional On-Location Conference in Boulder, CO, in October 2019; an Award for Excellence and the Chairman’s Choice award. Curry also published an article about the making of the film in the BEA publication, the Journal of Media Education (JOME), in October.
Jenny Davis (MC) ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in July 2019 to fund the production of the Yeoman Warders Project, a trilogy song cycle of compositions Davis worked on at VCFA, featuring fellow VCFA alumnx, faculty, and musicians. She also started Three Penny Records with 2019 alumnx Vanessa Littrell and Tiffany Pfeiffer.
Jennifer Ditona (VA) collaborated with artist and curator Naomi Even-Aberle (’19 VA) on an exhibition titled The Idea of You in June–August 2020, as part of EvenAberle’s The Kitchen Sink Project. In this body of work, Ditona asked women from differing backgrounds to respond to the question, “In a relationship you’ve had, no matter how brief or drawn out, how did the idea of you that someone else had differ from the reality—and vice versa?” She received very intimate, relatable responses, and she took their stories as well as a few of her own and turned the words into art. The work explores the intersection of feminine idealism and a personal truth, and is based on the façade that often canvases a relationship. Nicholas Emery (VA) collaborated with Emilie Upczak (’15 F) on Controlled Wild, a video installation visually exploring human industry, expansion, movement, and boundaries, as well as public and private land, wildlife, and wildlife crossing corridors in North Denver. The piece received an INSITE FUND grant from the Redline Contemporary Art Center and the Andy Warhol Foundation. The fund describes itself as “a grant program that responds to the gap in funding support for artistdriven projects on Colorado’s Front Range in non-traditional spaces.”
2018
Kate Bucca’s (W) short story “Chlorine” was one of ten winning stories and essays selected by Kate Bernheimer for inclusion in the 2019 Masters Review Anthology, released in October 2019. Min Choi (GD) presented a talk at the 2nd International Conference on Disability Studies, Arts & Education, held at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia in October 2019. From the conference website: “This conference aims to bring together artists, educators, researchers, students, and members of the disability community who share an interest in, or whose work addresses, the intersections and interplay between critical disability studies, arts, and education. The scope of the conference comprises various art forms, such as visual arts, performing arts, dance, and film, as well as different contexts of education, such as primary education, higher education, professional artists’ education and public pedagogy.”
Stephen Geller’s (W) short story, “Fallen Leaves,” was published in the spring 2019 issue of National University’s GNU Journal. Another story, “The Obi-Wan Machine,” appeared in The MacGuffin, volume 36, number 1, in spring 2020. Anne Krawitz’s (W) story “The Cottage” was selected in the top 25 for the final Glimmer Train Family Matters contest.
Allison Hong Merrill (W) is the very first winner of the Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction, announced in June 2020. Merrill’s memoir, Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops, which she worked on during her time at VCFA, is forthcoming from She Writes Press in the Fall 2021 catalog. Linda Murphy Marshall (W) became the Translation Editor of the Los Angeles Review in 2020. She also published numerous pieces in 2019–2020, including “Fifty Minutes” (Storgy Magazine, August 2019), “Photographic Memory” (Los Angeles Review, 2020), “Child’s Play” (The Maryland Literary Review, December 2019), “Déjà Vu” (American Writers Review: A Literary Journal: Art in the Time of COVID-19, June 2020), “Mistaken Identity” (Adelaide Literary Magazine, May 2020), “Bittersweet” (American Writers Review, Honorable Mention in 2019 contest), and book review of MFAW faculty Patrick Madden’s Disparates (PopMatters, May 2020). Patricia D. Pin’s (W) first published poem, “Contagion,” was published by the Straw Dog Writers’ Guild in May 2020. Heather Snyder Quinn (GD) was a winner of the 2019 STA 100 for her VCFA thesis work, Transparency: Past, Present, Future. Awarded by the Society of Typographic Arts, it recognizes “the 100 best examples of typographic excellence produced each year.” Rosemary Rae’s (GD) artist book, A Spider Sewed at Night, was accepted into “Biblio Spectaculum,” a national juried book arts exhibition of artist books and textbased visual works. The exhibit was at Main Street Arts in Clifton Springs, NY, in June–August 2020. Rae’s accordion-folded book showcases her own writing and collages inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and is a complement to the thesis she completed at VCFA in 2018.
39 :: vermont college of fine arts
Megan Vered (W) and Jennifer Lang (’16 W) co-wrote a post on Brevity in May 2020, “Writers Near and Far: Shared Prompts and Tic-Tac-Toe Boxes,” describing the post-COVID-19 changes that occurred with their writing group as they shifted from in-person to Zoom meetings. Vered’s essay “We Want the Park” was published in Coachella Review in June 2020.