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Get Breaking News on your cellDobie Paisano Fellowship winners announced
1:28 PM Tue, May 13, 2008 | Permalink
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May 2008
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The Dobie Paisano Fellowship is one of the sweeter deals in Texas letters: Four to six months at a Hill Country ranch, just you and your deep thoughts. The lucky thinkers for 2008-09 are: Michael Erard, author of Um...: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean. (Which our reviewer called "fascinating and enlightening" last fall.) The official bio says: ""He has been a contributing writer for the Texas Observer since 1999. As a freelancer, his reportage, essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired, Science, Rolling Stone, Lingua Franca, The New Scientist, Seed, Technology Review, The North American Review, the Austin Chronicle, and many other publications." (As luck would have it, I dined with him at the Texas Book Festival, and I can say he's just the kind of person you'd like to see out on a ranch, thinking deep thoughts.) Vanessa Ramos, whom the press release calls "a poet, playwright, and creative-nonfiction writer. As a McNair Scholar, she completed an ethnographic study (Women Between Earth and Sky) on curanderismo or folk-healing in the Southwest. Her awards include a Many Voices residency at the Playwrights' Center (2006 - 2007) and a Loft Mentor Series Award in Nonfiction (2005 - 2006). Her play, Cuentos, Stories, was showcased at the Waring Jones Theater in 2007. She is working on "a collection of memoir-driven lyric essays that explore the relationship between landscape and memory." Want to apply for next year? Your deadline is Jan. 15, 2009. |
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Comments
Posted by Michael Merschel @ 5:26 PM Tue, May 13, 2008
Michael writes in to say that he'll be working on a book he's calling "Babel No More," which he says will be about "the upper limits of the human ability to learn and speak languages."