Dust & Fire Awards

Dust & Fire Award certificates are given for exceptional work in poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction and art.  The certificates are presented at the Publication Reading & Reception or are mailed to recipients.

Diane Glancy Award in Poetry
Diane Glancy is a novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright. Her literary prizes include an American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award, the Native American Prose Award, a Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers Award and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship. Her fiction includes the novels Fuller Man, The Closets of Heaven, and short story collections Pushing the Bear, The Voice That Was in Travel, Monkey Secret, and Firesticks. Her poetry books include Asylum in the Grasslands, The Relief of America, Coyote’s Quodlibet, Lone Dog’s Winter Count, and Iron Woman. Glancy says that ‘‘Writing is a conversation,” and that she and her students “come together to take risks and reach new frontiers." She teaches at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Carol Bly Award in Nonfiction
Carol Bly is a Minnesota essayist and fiction writer. Her books include Changing the Bully Who Rules the World, which won a Minnesota Book Award; The Tomcat’s Wife and Other Stories; My Lord Bag of Rice: New & Selected Stories; and The Life of an Ordinary Woman. She is the recipient of several awards including two Minnesota Book Awards, Friends of American Writers, Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Fellowship, and an honorary doctorate from Northland College. Bly’s work is tinged with humor, and her stories portray Midwesterners, along with people in general, who manage to cultivate a sense of greatness in their lives. Her latest publication, Beyond the Writer’s Workshop: New Ways to Write Creative Non-fiction will be available April 2001. She resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jonis Agee Award in Fiction
Jonis Agee is a Minnesota fiction writer. Her novels include South of Resurrection, Strange Angels, the New York Times Notable Book Sweet Eyes, and The Weight of Dreams. Her story collection, Bend This Heart, from Coffee House Press, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, including the NEA and Loft-McKnight Award. Agee takes her readers into the hearts and minds of her characters so vividly that it provides an intimate relationship between the two. Her intensely beautiful writing prompted The New York Times to call her a "gifted poet of that dark lushness in the heart of American landscape.” She teaches at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota

Carole Gorney Fisher Award in Art
Carole Gorney Fisher is a multi-media artist who works primarily with "issue-driven" installations. Exhibitions of her work have been shown at Galleria Del Cavallino, Venice, Italy; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Women’s Building, Los Angeles; the Plains Museum in Fargo, North Dakota and other locations. She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including Bush Foundation Fellowships in the Visual Arts, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grants, a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. Fisher currently is Director and Graduate and Post Baccalaureate Programs Professor in the Fine Arts Division of Minneapolis College of Art & Design.