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MFA Alum Erica Dawson Wins Anthony Hecht Prize
MFA Alum Erica Dawson's manuscript Big-Eyed Afraid was awarded the 2006 Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. Her manuscript was selected from more than 450 other manuscripts. The prize includes a $3,000 check and publication in the fall of 2007.
"Big-Eyed Afraid is essentially a revised version of my master's thesis which was titled, Under an Assumed Name," Dawson said. "After graduation, I continued revising, and before submitting the manuscript to competitions, I added several poems and removed a few as well."
The MFA program gave Dawson three years to focus on writing and revising her book. "OSU was generous enough to afford me a great deal of time and money to work on my manuscript. Several fellowships, during fall and winter quarters as well as summer quarters, gave me time away from the classroom to focus on my own work rather than teaching, and during those times I made huge strides toward finishing the book. I'm very grateful for the department's generosity."
Erica Dawson was born in Columbia, Maryland, in 1979. Majoring in the Writing Seminars, she received her BA with departmental honors from Johns Hopkins University in 2001. After earning her Master of Fine Arts from Ohio State University in 2006, she moved south to the University of Cincinnati, where she is pursuing a PhD in English and Comparative Literature as the Elliston Fellow in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Blackbird, Sewanee Theological Review, Southwest Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Kathy Fagan, professor of poetry and Dawson's former thesis advisor, said, "There was never a moment when I had anything but praise for Erica and her work. The book is filled with precisely the kind of snap, energy, craft, and buzz-themes that memorable books are made of: intricate rhyme schemes, issues of female and black identity, mother/daughter meditations, erotically charged encounters. Big-Eyed Afraid will be a blockbuster. Erica's a true poet.”
