Blackwood Recieves Prestigious Whiting Writers' Award

Scott Blackwood, with wife, Tommi, at the Awards Ceremony! Exclusive Pic!

Scott Blackwood, novelist, assistant professor of literature, and famed Director of Roosevelt's MFA in Creative Writing, has received the prestigious $50,000 Whiting Writers' Award, given annually, to emerging writers! The award has been given to the likes of Denis Johnson, Jonathan Franzen, Lydia Davis, Ben Fountain, and Stuart Dybek, to name just a few! Scott is one of ten writers (four fiction, four poets, one non-fiction, and one playwright) to receive the award this past Tuesday, October 25th, in New York City, from the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation.

The Legend. The Novel.

The award is not just based on past accomplishments, though Scott has many! His novel, We Agreed to Meet Just Here, released in 2009, won the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Fiction, was a winner in the AWP Award Series in the Novel, and was a finalist for the 2010 PEN USA Award! His first book, the story collection, In the Shadow of Our House, was published in 2001. 

He's also the Director of our growing program here at Roosevelt! Says Scott, “My hope is that this award will also bring the Creative Writing Program some attention, partly for our focus on our values." 

But what are our values, Scott? 

This is not what a Roosevelt Writer looks like! No Lone Wolves here!

 

“Creative writers are not lone wolves. We’re very interdependent and the Whiting Award process, in some ways, is about this interdependence. It’s anonymous and outside the writers’ control, meaning there are no applications, no ambitious writers schmoozing for better positioning, none of that. It’s ultimately about your work and how it affects others. That is the kind of community of writers we are building at Roosevelt University and the kind of community of writers I have been fortunate to have been a part of since my writing career began.”

This is what Roosevelt writers look like! Wolf Pack!

Ah, I remember now!

The Whiting Writers' Award also looks at a writer's exceptional talent and promise. Which works just fine, because Scott is working on his new novel, probably at this very moment! Ask him about it or read about it on the bottom of the Roosevelt article, here! This is a huge award, reported by the likes of the NY Times and Washington Post and Chicago Sun-Times - so, the next time you see Scott, congratulate him enthusiastically!

Blackwood's novel a finalist for PEN USA

MFA Program Director Scott Blackwood's novel, We Agreed To Meet Just Here, was just named a finalist for the prestigious PEN USA Literary Award for fiction. PEN Center USA’s annual awards program, established in 1982, is a unique, regional competition that recognizes literary excellence in ten categories. Past award winners include Barbara Kingsolver, Maxine Hong Kingston, T.C. Boyle and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Blackwood's novel was also awarded the AWP Prize for the Novel, and the Texas Institute of Letters Award for Best Work of Fiction.

Scott Blackwood's Novel Now Available

We Agreed To Meet Just Here, the AWP award-winning novel by Scott Blackwood (our very own director), hit the bookshelves this week and is now available on Amazon. Published by New Issues Press, Blackwood's novel is "a lyrical mystery about disappearance, told in precise and luminous prose."

We Agreed To Meet Just Here has already garnered some good reviews in Texas Monthly and My San Antonio. Here's what others have to say:

"Extravagantly beautiful and yet offhand, We Agreed to Meet Just Here sweeps us along with its lush, hypnotic prose. Each of its characters is drawn to the illusion of forbidden perfection, the belief that the darkness, absence, and silence from which babies arrive and into which the dead enter is numinous proof our every wish will be fulfilled. As readers, we see what Scott Blackwood’s characters can’t see: a world so perfectly wrought every small gesture or urge matters."  --Debra Monroe, author of Shambles

"This little gem of a book puts on lush display Scott Blackwood's talent for measuring and connecting the previously un-connectable in lived experience, and making of it an entirely new whole which we immediately accept as true, natural, exhilarating, even inevitable. He is a lovely sentence writer, and this first novel sparkles with invention." --Richard Ford

Scott Blackwood will be reading an excerpt from We Agreed To Meet Just Here during the AWP Conference next week, on Friday, February 13th in Roosevelt's Gage Gallery. More details soon.