DENTON (UNT), Texas -- Two University of North Texas doctoral students in the Department of English, Jenny Molberg and Chelsea Wagenaar, recently received awards for their poetry.
Wagenaar won the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry from Fresno State University for her book "Mercy Spurs the Bone," that will be published this November. She received a $2,000 award.
"I can hardly wrap my mind around it," Wagenaar said. "When you enter your manuscript in a book contest, you do so because you have some hope you could win, but even so, it seemed impossible when it happened."
Wagenaar also recently earned the 2014 Voertman/Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem "August," in which she describes an X-ray of a fractured ankle as "Mercy spurred the bone/like a newbirthed star in the thin corridors/of your ankle."
Molberg won this year's Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry. She will receive $3,000 and publication of her book, "Marvels of the Invisible," by Tupelo Press. Molberg plans to use her winnings to travel.
Molberg said she feels gratitude to Jeffery Harrison, a fellow poet and judge for the 2014 Berkshire Prize, who chose her book for the award. "I feel such gratitude to Jeffrey Harrison and Tupelo Press--I'm lucky the book has found a home there," Molberg said. "It has also given me the energy to begin a second book."
Bruce Bond, professor of English, met Molberg about three years ago and later became her mentor
"She has a natural lyric gift for metaphor, precise and evocative diction, and musical phrasing, coupled with a penetrating insight into how people work and do not work," Bond said. "'Narrative' is a great poem, no doubt, in the way it investigates intimacy as fundamentally ineffable and articulated via terms that are quite remote from the immediate situation, remote from what we loosely call 'human' even."
About the Department of English
The Department of English at UNT cultivates scholarly/creative achievement and provides graduate- and undergraduate-level instruction in the areas of Anglophone literary and cultural studies, creative writing and rhetoric/composition. The department strives to promote greater understanding of literary and cultural texts and to guide students toward practical fluency in literary theory; to contribute to the literary traditions of the language by fostering the creation of new works of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction; to develop theories and methods of writing instruction; and to investigate the history and forms of persuasive writing. With nearly 100 full-time faculty and teaching fellows, the Department of English is one of the largest and most diverse in UNT's College of Arts and Sciences.