Two grad students take prizes in Atlantic Monthly writing contest

By Franklin Crawford

Cornell graduate student Misty Urban won first place in the fiction category in The Atlantic Monthly's 2004 Student Writing Contest, and graduate student Dawn Lonsinger won an honorable mention in the magazine's poetry category. Both Urban and Lonsinger are students in Cornell's MFA program in creative writing.

TheAtlantic Monthly's annual contest is open to full-time graduate and undergraduate students at U.S. universities.

Urban

Urban will receive a $1,000 first-place prize for The Keeping of the Counts, a short story focusing on the emotional and psychic life of a mother whose son is being treated for cancer in a pediatrics ward. That's the general plot, at least.

"Otherwise," Urban said, "it's about all the things short stories should be about: ambitions and relationships and figuring out how to reconcile faith and suffering and life lived on the edge of imminent loss."

Urban earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 1997, along with a minor in creative writing. Following a stint as a consultant, she received an M.A. in English literature and creative writing from Florida State University in 2003. Urban is currently pursuing a joint degree MFA and Ph.D. at Cornell with emphases in fiction writing and Old and Middle English literature, respectively.

The award is generous and welcome, Urban said.

"But the true payoff is in the encouragement of knowing someone read your story and thought about it and liked it well enough to favor it out of all the other immediate possibilities. Any time that happens, I'm grateful and amazed."

The Atlantic Monthly received about 1,000 submissions across three categories in the 2004 contest: fiction, poetry and personal or journalistic essays.

Lonsinger's poem Diorama: Murano "grew like parsley out of my obsession with replicas and my time in Italy," the second-year MFA poetry student said.

"Surrounded by water and glass, I realized how frank our fragility is, how famous our flux, yet we fill the former with smoke and gumption and grasp the latter as if flesh is the epoxy the brain belts out."

Lonsinger earned a B.A. in English and photography in 1998 and an M.A. in English, both from Bucknell University.

The highly selective Cornell MFA program accepts just four fiction writers and four poets each year.