News

Dr. William Woolfitt, assistant professor of English at Lee University, has won the 2013 Texas Review Breakthrough Poetry Prize for his collection of poetry, “Beauty Strip.”

 
“Beauty Strip” focuses on the landscapes and living things of Appalachia, protests the industrialization that results in ruin, and celebrates the human ability to remake, redeem, and find shelter and homes.

“I’d say that the structure of ‘Beauty Strip’ is part sketchbook, part dreambook,” said Woolfitt. “It maps and ruminates on, haunts and is haunted by, the mountaintop removal sites and mill towns, the salt-works and bloomeries, that have scarred the land from West Virginia to Virginia to Tennessee.”

 
Woolfitt joined Lee’s Department of Language and Literature in fall 2012, where he teaches creative writing and American literature. He is the author of two chapbooks, “The Salvager’s Arts,” co-winner of the Keystone Prize, and “The Boy with Fire in His Mouth,” winner of the Epiphany Editions contest.

Woolfitt’s poems and stories appear in such publications as Shenandoah, Michigan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, New Ohio Review, Appalachian Heritage, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, River Styx, Virginia Quarterly Review’s Instapoetry Series, and Tin House’s Flash Friday series. Recently, Woolfitt also took runner-up in the 2013 Gold Line Press Fiction Chapbook Competition.

The Texas Review Press publishes between 20 and 23 titles a year, including the winners of four international competitions and an annual Southern poetry anthology, making it one of the most productive literary presses in the Southwest.

For more information on the Texas Review Press, please visit http://www.shsu.edu/~www_trp/index.html.