Essay from Ruminate Magazine Wins Pushcart Prize
The publisher and editor of the Pushcart anthology, Bill Henderson, stated that “there are around 8,000 nominations for the award every year, and to even receive one once is extremely rare.” Writers receiving 2014 Pushcart awards include United States Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, New York Times bestselling novelist Andre Dubus III, and Pulitzer Prize winning poet Louise Glück.
When selecting “Father of Disorder” for Ruminate magazine’s VanderMey nonfiction award, writer Lesley Leyland Fields wrote, “’Father of Disorder’ presents the inevitable yet mysterious unraveling of a particular family system. The burden of her witness is a haunting and beautiful lament in language I almost want to call ‘perfect.’”
Of her essay, Jessica Wilbanks wrote: “My favorite thing about writing nonfiction is the freedom to draw on all kinds of divergent subject matter to tell a story that’s much larger than simply the story of ‘what happened.’ In “Father of Disorder,” I use thermodynamics, religion, and pop culture as tools to explore questions about my childhood that I’d never quite been able to answer.”
The Pushcart Prize series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America. Winner of honors from the National Book Critics Circle, Publishers Weekly, Poets & Writers / Barnes & Noble and others, and acclaimed by readers and reviewers internationally, The Pushcart Prize series continues to be a testament to the flourishing of American fiction, essays, memoirs and poetry in our small, independent presses. Over 700 magazine and small book press editors may make up to six nominations from their year’s publications in poetry, short fiction, and essays.
Jessica Wilbanks is a graduate of the University of Houston’s MFA program in Creative Writing, and her essays have appeared or are upcoming in Ninth Letter, The Tusculum Review, Sojourners, and Puritan. She is an active member of the Houston writing community, has taught writing workshops for Inprint!, Houston’s literary arts organization and Boldface, the annual undergraduate writing conference based at the University of Houston, and also served as Nonfiction Editor for Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and the Arts. Ms. Wilbanks is currently at work on a memoir about Pentecostal Christianity.
For more information about her work, please visit http://jessicawilbanks.com . For more from Ms. Wilbanks on 'Father of Disorder', see her interview with Ruminate Magazine.
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Also in The Waking
The Hours
The Hour Instructing the Boy / How to Show His Mother Love Without Hurting Her or / Damaging the Tubing that Sustains Her. The Hour of Grading Papers / Without (Really) Reading Them, then the Hour of Justifying / This is Just Fine This Once.
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.