$25,000 Rona Jaffe Award in poetry goes to Melanie Drane

Wow! The Rona Jaffe Foundation is celebrating its 17th annual writers' awards. They're hefty, to the tune of $25,000 grants! And they go to women writers in early stages of their careers! Considering this important new study, this is good news for our pocketbooks. The 2011 award in poetry has just been announced: it will go to Durham, North Carolina poet Melanie Drane. More about Drane and the awards, from the release:

The Rona Jaffe Foundation will honor its annual Writers’ Awards winners at a private ceremony on September 22nd in New York City. Six emerging women writers have been singled out for excellence by the Foundation and will receive awards of $25,000 each. The 2011 winners are Melanie Drane, Apricot Irving, Fowzia Karimi, Namwali Serpell, Merritt Tierce, and JoAnn Wypijewski. The program – the only national literary awards program of its kind devoted exclusively to women – was created by celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe to identify and support women writers of unusual talent and promise in the early stages of their writing careers. Ms. Jaffe passed away in 2005.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards are given to writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Since the program began in 1995, the Foundation has awarded more than $1 million to emergent women writers. Past recipients of the Writers’ Awards, such as Eula Biss, Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, Kathleen Graber, Aryn Kyle, Dana Levin, ZZ Packer, Julia Slavin, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Julia Whitty have since received wider critical recognition. In addition, several, recent Rona Jaffe winners have had impressive literary debuts: Elif Batuman, Sarah Braunstein, Carin Clevidence, Robin Ekiss, Rivka Galchen, Holly Goddard Jones, Lori Ostlund, Helen Phillips, Melissa Range, Rita Mae Reese, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and Jennie Erin Smith.

Melanie Drane is working on a new manuscript of poems entitled The Language Orchard, which explores the profound experience of her sister’s severe aphasia after a recent stroke, and their efforts to recover her language. She has also completed a book-length manuscript entitled The City of Blademakers, reflecting her many years living in Japan. Ms. Drane received her B.A. from Princeton, her M.A. from UC, Berkeley, and her M.F.A. from the University of Southern Maine at Stonecoast. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, New South, The Iowa Review, and The Huffington Post. She has received the UK National Poetry Competition First Prize, as well as a North Carolina Arts Council literary fellowship, and served as writer-in-residence at Interlochen Center for the Arts from 2002-2004. Until recently, she was the director and instructor of writing workshops of Basho’s Cabin. She is now a full-time caregiver. Her Rona Jaffe Award will allow her to rent a writing space and hire a part-time companion to stay with her sister while she works on this new collection. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.