Honored for non-fiction work Watchfires

Hilary Plum, associate director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, has received the 2018 New Writers Award for Creative Non-fiction, presented by the Great Lakes Colleges Association. She was honored for her first nonfiction work Watchfires, published by Rescue Press. Now in its 49th year, the New Writers Awards confer recognition on promising writers who have published a first volume in one of three genres, fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Winning writers receive invitations to visit GLCA member colleges where they give readings and conduct talks on writing with students and faculty members.

“Urgent and probing, generous and judicious, Hilary Plume’s Watchfires asks the big questions: what does it mean to be at war, to be sick, to be in love, to be family?” noted GLCA in the award announcement. “This book possesses a beautiful lyricism, a deeply ruminative poeticism, and a steadily building sense of conviction that war and love, disease and health are perhaps more close than might make us comfortable.”

“Hilary is a tremendously talented writer and educator and this award further highlights her growing national reputation,” adds Caryl Pagel, director of the CSU Poetry Center. “We are very lucky to have her on the staff at the Poetry Center where she serves as a major asset to our students and the Cleveland literary community.”

Plum has previously written two novels They Dragged Them Through the Streets and Strawberry Fields, the latter of which won the Fence Modern Prize in Prose. Prior to joining CSU in 2017 she served as managing editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, book-review editor for Kenyon Review and co-director of Clockroot Books.

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