Lauren Goodwin Slaughter Among Rona Jaffe Award Winners

The 2012 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards have been announced! Poet Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is among the winners.

On the award, from the Foundation's website:

In recognition of the special contributions women writers make to our culture and society, The Rona Jaffe Foundation is giving its eighteenth annual Writers’ Awards under a program that identifies and supports women writers of exceptional talent. The emphasis is on those in the early stages of their writing careers. This unique program offers grants to writers of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry to make writing time available and provide assistance for such specific purposes as child care, research and related travel costs.

Six emerging women writers have been singled out for excellence by the Foundation and will receive awards of $30,000 each. The 2012 winners are Julia Elliott, Christina Nichol, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter, Rachel Swearingen, Kim Tingley, and Inara Verzemnieks.

And, the write-up on Slaughter:

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is working on her first collection of poems, A Lesson in Smallness. She says of this work, “My poems explore the way our identities can be symbolically expressed in seemingly benign objects and experiences—a trip to the salon, a high-tech mixer, a county fair ribbon, an ultrasound. These poems are particularly interested in taking a sometimes-critical, sometimes-celebratory look at how my own relatively new roles in the domestic sphere coincide with the most esoteric human experiences.” She will also begin a new series of poems responding to the tornadoes that struck her home state of Alabama last year. Ms. Slaughter received her B.A. from Kenyon College, her M.A. from the University of Montana, and her M.F.A in poetry and fiction from the University of Alabama. She is assistant editor at poemmemoirstory and fiction editor at DIAGRAM. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Chariton Review, Hunger Mountain, among others, and she has received fellowships from Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Vermont Studio Center. Her nominator writes, “I think you’ll find evidence of not only a first-rate stylist, but also a kind of sea-deep emphatic vision and humor in a combination that is rare to find in a poet at any stage in her career.” Ms. Slaughter is an assistant professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham. She hopes to take a leave of absence next year, use her Writer’s Award for childcare and living expenses, and focus on these two poetry collections and a novel-in-progress. She lives with her husband and three-year-old in Birmingham, Alabama.

Congrats to all winners! More here.