Despite what you might have read in the latest issue of Poets & Writers magazine, the deadline for the Wyoming Arts Council Blanchan/Doubleday writing awards is Sept. 17, 2007, and not Aug. 17. And please disregard the application info now on our web site. We suspect that hackers have infiltrated the system and changed the information to foment unrest in the Wyoming writing community.
Printed applications will be mailed next week.
Judge for this year's Blanchan/Doubleday competition is poet and translator Shaun T. Griffin of Nevada. Here's his bio:
Shaun T. Griffin's latest book of poems was Winter in Pediatrics, included in The Harvest of Lesser Burdens, Art in the Fields of Medicine series, published by the Nevada Museum of Art Press, 2006. Bathing in the River of Ashes was published by the University of Nevada Press in 1999, and Death to Silence (translations from the Chilean poet, Emma Sepúlveda) was released by Arte Público Press in 1997. In 1995 he received the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts. For many years he has taught a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center and published an annual journal of their work, Razor Wire. He regularly contributes poetry, essays, and translations to literary journals in the west, and was editor-at-large at Calapooya and contributing editor at Weber Studies. He just finished a memoir about a long journey with his family from Tokyo to Patagonia — The House of a Thousand Arms. In 2006, he received the Rosemary McMillan Lifetime Achievement in Art Award from Sierra Arts Foundation.
He has lived in Nevada since 1978, except for the four years when his wife was in graduate school in the San Francisco Bay Area. He and his family live in Virginia City, at the western-most edge of the Great Basin.
He is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a non-profit agency serving children and families in northwestern Nevada since 1991, and the former founding director of the state’s homeless education office. Shaun has spent a lifetime trying to build bridges where there were none for all members of the human community. During the mid-1980s he worked in Stanford University’s foremost community outreach program, starting several disability initiatives on that campus. He later founded a minority youth outreach program for four universities in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2004, he received the Mike O’Callaghan Humanitarian Award, named after the former Nevada Governor. He serves on the board of the Nevada Arts Council.
