Friday, March 31, 2006

Wilmington, N.C. - Two of five finalists for the National Magazine Award in feature writing are faculty members in the University of North Carolina Wilmington Department of Creative Writing.

Wendy Brenner, associate professor and MFA coordinator in the creative writing program, and John Sullivan, an at-large editor for Gentlemen's Quarterly who joined the department part-time in 2005, were both selected as candidates for this coveted award which recognizes excellence in feature writing and "honors the stylishness and originality with which the author treats his or her subject."

"For a university to have two of its faculty nominated for this prestigious award is like having two of its conference teams make the Final Four in a single year," said Philip Furia, department chair.

Brenner was nominated for her article published in the winter edition of The Oxford American, entitled Love and Death at the Cape Fear Serpentarium. Sullivan's nominated article, Upon This Rock, was published in GQ.

Brenner joined the UNCW faculty in 1997 shortly after she had won the Flannery O'Connor Prize for her first book of short stories. She accepted the position at UNCW over "a very handsome offer from Vanderbilt University," Furia noted.

She has received numerous accolades for her writing, including the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, the Henfield Award, and the AWP Intro Award. She earned a bachelors degree from Oberlin College in 1987 and an MFA from the University of Florida in 1991.

Sullivan's writing has appeared in the Paris Review, New York, the New York Times, and Harper's, where he spent four years as a senior editor. He is a three-time past recipient of National Magazine Awards, including an award for Feature Writing (2003), and awards for editing in the categories of Reviews & Criticism (2002), and Special Issue (1998). He received a 2004 Whiting Writers' Award, and his memoir, Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son (Picador, 2005) was named a Book of the Year by The Economist. He holds a bachelor's degree from Sewanee, Tennessee.

Sullivan and his wife Mariana Johnson (an assistant professor in the UNCW Department of Film Studies) moved to Wilmington from New York City in 2004. At UNCW, Sullivan has taught courses in creative nonfiction, advised graduate students on their MFA theses, and participated in Writer's Week, which Furia describes as "our annual literary version of March Madness, where we bring in visiting writers, agents, editors, and publicists to celebrate the art of the word."

The National Magazine Awards were established by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in 1966. The program is sponsored by ASME in association with the Graduate School of Journalism of Columbia University. Entries are reviewed by a judging panel which recommends a group of finalists, and a second panel of judges chooses a winner in each category.

"Wendy and John are my literary "post" players - bring on Duke!" Furia declared.

###