Good News for Me!

The good news is that I won the 2010 Hub City Award for Poetry. Click to read the article.
My youngest suggested that mine must have been the ONLY poetry entry this year. Oh, nay, nay, I said. There were prizes offered for 2nd and 3rd places as well. And the icing on the cake - I also took third place in fiction.

Good News

One of my stories has been accepted to appear in Hub City's newest anthology, The Essential Fiction of Spartanburg, to come out in April 2009. It is edited by C. Michael Curtis, the senior editor of The Atlantic magazine. He is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities at Wofford College.

Former Byrnes Teacher Wins National Award

My former 11th grade American Lit. teacher won an award for her YA historical fiction novel about local Revolutionary War heroine, Kate Berry. Sheila Collins, now Sheila Ingle, was fresh out of college when she taught English at James F. Byrnes High School back in 1970. I loved her class.

http://www.hubcity.org/accolades/hub-city-author-wins-national-award.html

Hub City Writers article in SHJ Apr. 1, 2007

Area writers win awards, workshops.

Oh my! I won third place.

I didn't expect to win a thing this year. I had forgotten all about the annual Hub City Writers contest. I hadn't seen anything about it on their web site. When I asked Betsy Teter if they were still having the contest, she told me that the deadline was only a few days away (the web site was being redesigned and not updated.) I didn't have time to produce something from scratch, so I pulled out an old piece I had started and tweaked it - staying up late the night before it was to be postmarked. I thought they'd throw it out. Really.


Having won first place in 2005, I got spoiled. A week in the North Carolina mountains at Wildacres retreat is a wonderful way to pamper a new writer. I wasn't allowed to enter last year. That's the rule, winners can't enter the next year. So I forked out the bucks. Both years I had to miss big softball tournaments my youngest daughter played in. I really don't want to do that again this year. The third place prize gives me a big discount to the Writing in Place conference at Wofford. Which is also enjoyable, just not a week long.

Oh, well. I'll keep trying every year for the scholarship to Wildacres.