Pride in the Acclaimed Writers at USF

David Vann, a faculty member in the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco, where I teach, has just won a very prestigious French award, the 2010 Prix Medicis etranger (for foreign writers), often compared to the Pulitzer Prize in the U.S. He won for his novella "Sukwon Island," published in the U.S. as part of the book "Legend of a Suicide." Vann is just one of the USF's faculty's prize-winning, acclaimed writers. In February 2010, poet D. A. Powell, also of the MFA Program, won one of the top awards in poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a purse of $100,000, for his poetry collection, "Chronic." Poet and English professor Dean Rader recently won the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for his first book of poetry, "Works and Days." Just a couple of months ago, MFA professor Catherine Brady won the 2010 Northern California Book Award in Fiction for "The Mechanics of Falling and Other Stories." Other well-published and frequently honored USF writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction include Aaron Shurin, Susan Steinberg, and Lewis Buzbee. I am proud of these very talented USF colleagues.