Recognition, Prize Money and More for Area Writers

Susan Ludvigson

Jennifer Hubbard

Susan Ludvigson, professor emerita at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, is this year's winner of the prestigious James Dickey Award from Five Points magazine in Atlanta. Her winning poems,"Divigations," "Mythologies" and "Sharing the Territory," will be published in the fall issue of Five Points and are included in her new manuscript, as yet untitled. The award carries a $1,000 prize. Ludvigson has nine poetry collections from Louisiana State University Press and has received many honors over the years, including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships, as well as fellowships from the NEA and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is the widow of fiction writer Scott Ely, who also taught for many years at Winthrop.

Kathryn Schwille's short-short story, "FM104," which appeared in Issue 20 of the literary journal Memorious, has won a spot on the 2014 Wigleaf Top Very Short Fiction List (under 1,000 words), selected from about 200 nominations of stories that appeared online last year. The judge says Schwille's story "...speaks in a hybrid language of beautiful lunacy and keen prophecy." Schwille's fiction has appeared previously in such literary  journals as Crazyhorse, West Branch and Sycamore Review. She is a recipient of a 2014 North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. "FM04" is the opening to her manuscript of short stories, "24 Seconds," set against the backdrop the Columbia shuttle disaster in East Texas. Schwille lives in Charlotte and earned her MFA at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa.

The young adult novel, "And We Stay" (Random House), by former Charlotte Country Day English teacher Jennifer Hubbard, now of Salisbury, is on the summer reading list for students at Woodberry Forest boarding school in Madison County, Va. Also on the list -- students can select three and no fair listening to audio books -- John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars," Nick Hornby's "Slam," and Pat Conroy's "My Losing Season." Hubbard's novel, set on the campus of a girls' Massachusetts boarding school, is "quite a page-turner," says the blurb. "Part mystery, part bildungsroman, this intelligent novel brings us into contact with a complex, conflicted heroine who doesn't care much about following the rules." Hubbard is a former English teacher at Woodberry Forest and is 100 pages into her third novel for young adults, modeled on five girls she taught at Country Day.