Wyoming Arts Council

2015 Blanchan and Doubleday Writing Award winners announced

Featured News, Grant News | January 21, 2015

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The Wyoming Arts Council (WAC) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Blanchan and Doubleday Memorial Writing Awards.

Matt Daly of Jackson won the Neltje Blanchan award for nature writing for his manuscript, Wolf Hunter and Other Poems. Winner of the Frank Nelson Doubleday award for women writers is Marylee White of Wilson for her prose manuscript, Bird Barometer, Each of the writers will receive a $1,000 prize and a stipend to travel to a public reading later in the year.

Honorable mentions in the Blanchan category went to Nonie Proffit of Evanston and A. Rose Hill of Sheridan. Doubleday honorable mentions went to Lynn Carlson of Cheyenne and Amy Staehr of Jackson. The competition received a total of 82 entries.

Judge for the awards was Kurt Caswell whose new book of travel writing, Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents, will be published by Trinity University Press later this year. He was born in Alaska, grew up in Oregon and now is associate professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.

The Neltje Blanchan and Frank Nelson Doubleday awards are made possible through the generosity of private donor Neltje of Banner, Wyo.

Daly’s poetry appears in Clerestory, The Cortland Review, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere. He is the author of Wild Nature and the Human Spirit: a Field Guide to Journal Writing in Nature. He leads creative writing residencies for middle and high school students throughout Wyoming. He teaches composition at Central Wyoming College’s Jackson Outreach Center and is on the faculty of a week-long Harvard Medical School Continuing Medical Education course in Orvieto, Italy. In 2013, Daly received a creative writing fellowship in poetry from the Wyoming Arts Council. See his web site at http://www.dalypoetry.com/

Marylee White graduated from the University of Wyoming with a degree in journalism. She has worked as a writer, a preschool administrator and teacher and as an arts education administrator. She started the Bird Barometer blog after a friend gave her a small blank book with a sketch of a bird on its cover. She said this writing “has been a playful meditation on nature and a pure joy.” To read her work and view the accompanying artwork by Wyoming artists, go to https://arts4clc.wordpress.com

The Blanchan/Doubleday awards program is an annual competition administered by the Wyoming Arts Council. For more information about the awards visit the WAC website at www.wyomingartscouncil.org or contact Michael Shay at mike.shay@wyo.gov or 307-777-5234.

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