The 2009 Martin Dibner Memorial Fellowship in poetry has been awarded to Annaliese Jakimides of Bangor and Tanya Whiton of Portland. The Maine Community Foundation awards the fellowships annually to promising Maine writers seeking to improve their writing skills.
A freelance writer and copy editor, Jakimides writes for Bangor Metro magazine and facilitates workshops for the Maine Humanities Council. She won the Friends of Acadia Poetry Prize in 2004-2005 and the Diner Poetry Award in 2007, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2008. A graduate of Vermont College (BA, 1997), Jakimides will be attending the Solstice Summer Writers’ Conference this June.
Whiton, a graduate of University of Southern Maine (BA, 1993) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA, 2001), has taught writing at USM, the Stonecoast Writer’s Conference, and Lesley College. A program administrator for the Solstice Creative Writing Programs at Pine Manor College, she will be working on a poetry manuscript, “Anatomy of a Wave,” with support from the Dibner fellowship.
This year’s judges were poets Sharon Bray and Stuart Kestenbaum. Bray, from Orland, is one of the featured writers in the new Salt Coast Poets anthology A Rump-Sprung Chair and a One-Eyed Cat. Kestenbaum, from Deer Isle, is the author of three books of poems, most recently, Prayers & Run-on Sentences.
The Dibner fellowship alternates between fiction and poetry. Next year’s deadline, for fiction writers, is January 15, 2010.
Novelist and historian Martin Dibner served on the Maine Arts Commission and was the first director of the Payson Gallery at Westbrook College. Several friends created this fund to honor Dibner’s contributions to the art of writing.
May 13, 2009