Tina Chang Receives NYFA Annual Fellowship Grant!

Congratulations are in order to Four Way Books author Tina Chang, who was awarded the 2009 NYFA Annual Fellowship Grant! Tina's Most recent collection, Half-Lit Houses, was published in 2004.
See what Timothy Liu and Li-Young Lee have to say about Half-Lit Houses:

Her mouth is fertile, seeded with incidents from a family history that lay scattered about like grains of rice upon which our poet kneels. Misfit and starlet, she wrestles with her father on earth and in Heaven. Whether seasoned with gunpowder or with sugar, Tina Chang's legacy is neither entirely Chinese nor American but an inheritance to be spoken through dialects—a composite language forged out of her many lyrical selves.

—Timothy Liu


Tina Chang's poems perform the ancient tasks of remembrance, recovery, and praise. This work seeks to account for a life in the context of the myths, cultural and familial, that both nurture and threaten that very life and the voice that might sing it into legend. This is a poetry of amazing lushness, melancholy and affirmation.

—Li-Young Lee

Tina Chang's newest collection of poems Of Gods & Strangers is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2011.

www.tinachang.com

Eileen Pollack wins Silver Medal for Best Short Fiction

Eileen Pollack's collection In the Mouth, published last Spring, was awarded the Silver Medal for Best Short Fiction by Foreword Magazine. Congratulations to Ms. Pollack!

"Pollack writes about tragedy and transition with pathos and insight. Her stories acknowledge the everyday qualities of grief while according it gravity. Honest enough not to promise the false reassurance that everything will end happily, Pollack offers resolutions that have the character of a hard-fought, fragile peace with the world: 'a pleasant exhaustion,' or the knowledge that 'I would no more want to open that safe than I would want to dig up my mother’s coffin, pry open the lid, and see if her diamond wedding-ring is still on her finger and my father’s perfect fillings still inside her teeth.'

In the Mouth shows us how the secrets that might sunder a family often become its strongest connections. Whether in the guise of the unopened safe a family is selling in a yard sale, two married strangers forlornly attracted to each other at a resort, or a mother unable to express her fears about lavishing physical attention on her baby, these electric stories explore the nerve endings of human relationships."

-- from the Press Release for In the Mouth