MISSOULA – Emily Harman, a graduate student poet at the University of Montana, channeled grief and the loss of a father to win one of UM’s most revered writing awards.
Harman won the Merriam-Frontier Award for her collection of poetry titled “Surface Tension.” The award comes with $2,500 and a spring semester reading from the winning manuscript. Her reading is scheduled for 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 15, in the Poetry Corner of UM’s Mansfield Library.
“Getting to tell my father's story, my family's story and my own story through these poems is an immense privilege, one that I don't take for granted,” Harman said. “I’m truly honored to receive this award, and I’m so grateful to the judges for their attentive read of my manuscript and their trust in my work.”
The judging panel wrote: “In her collection, ‘Surface Tension,’ Harman writes with subtle restraint about the grief following a father’s suicide. Her poems explore loss while honoring the lives that continue around it – lives that open rather than close. These emotionally complex and well-crafted poems reveal fresh insights into the ways an unexpected death touches every aspect of life.”
The judges continue: “In her opening poem, ‘Occlusion,’ she writes, ‘Even now / I have trouble trusting / what I can not hold,’ as if through a warped lens, tenderly revisiting and revising memories from before an unexpected loss.”
Harman is a Master of Fine Arts student in UM’s acclaimed Creative Writing Program. She teaches creative writing classes at UM and serves as poetry editor for CutBank, UM’s literary journal. She describes herself as a “queer Minnesotan poet currently based in the coastal and inland Northwest.” Her work appears or is forthcoming in Shō Poetry Journal, Fugue, Bellingham Review, The Shore, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere.
The Merriam-Frontier Award has honored UM’s top student writers since 1982. It was established by the late H.G. Merriam, a UM English professor. Merriam arrived at UM in 1919 after being a member of the first class of American Rhodes Scholars in 1904. He began teaching creative writing in 1920 with five students and with them founded the literary magazine Frontier. Merriam spent his career nurturing Western writers and encouraging the Western voice in writing. He created the undergraduate degree in creative writing, the second of its kind in the United States after Harvard University. UM began offering the MFA in Creative Writing in 1964.
The judging panel included Ginny Merriam, a UM journalism alumna and Missoula communications professional; Lois Welch, a UM English Professor Emeritus; Jolene Brink, a UM Creative Writing alumna and past Merriam-Frontier winner now at the University of Minnesota; and Rob Schlegel, a UM Creative writing alumnus and faculty member at Whitman College.
“I just feel so lucky to get to write alongside such a brilliant, generous and supportive cohort and community,” Harman said.
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Contact: Chris Dombrowski, UM Creative Writing Program director, 406-243-5231, christopher.dombrowski@mso.umt.edu; Emily Harman, UM graduate student, emily.harman@umconnect.umt.edu.