From her ground-level position as a journalist, Emily Geminder was immersed in the sights and sounds and events that inform a writer’s work. While covering stories and editing pieces in New York and Cambodia, she developed a keen eye for the ways in which history remains tied to an invisible past.
Not content to tell a story based solely on current events, Geminder offered historic context that embellished and enriched the tale. As a fiction writer, she crafted stories about everything from bomber pilots dropping messages into villages below, to 13-year-old runaways, to the children of Cambodian refugees. Issues of memory and language were recurring themes in her fact-based writing.
A second year MFA student at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, Geminder’s talents have earned her the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2015 award for “Nausicaa,” a piece of creative non-fiction that relates, in letter form, her reading of “Ulysses” while she was in India. The Tampa Review will publish her winning entry in a forthcoming issue.
Thousands of writers, teachers, publishers and students flock to AWP’s annual conference every year. It’s a “who’s who” of the literary world, with the attendant panels, talks and book signings that are standard fare for such meetings. Its literary contest is open to students from the 500 American member colleges that are home to creative writing programs.
“The AWP award is the most prestigious and competitive national award that a creative writing student can receive,” said Whitney Terrell, assistant professor in the Department of English and the New Letters Distinguished Writer-in-Residence.
Reviewed 2015-05-26