BU Creative Writing

Terrific news from Kelly Morse (poetry '12) whose translations of censored Vietnamese poet Ly Doi recently won Lunch Ticket magazine's Gabo Prize for Translation and Multi-Lingual Texts. Kelly says she began these translations while in Rosanna Warren's Translation Seminar during her time in the MFA program at BU. The judge Dan Bellm, a poet and translator, had this to say about her translations:

“Boiled – Steamed – Raw,” poet Lý Đợi’s biting trio of diatribes against many forms of repression and violence in present-day Vietnam, plays brilliantly with the metaphorical structure of traditional recipes from the north, center, and south of his country. In his hands, these become the doctrinaire instruction manuals of hell, complete with helpful slogans for chanting along. But the tonal shifts, word play, and cultural and political references readily accessible to any native speaker of the language must have made this work especially daunting to translate. Kelly Morse skillfully interweaves a range of registers from high bureaucratic doublespeak and textbook blandness to Buddhist meditation, street slang and song to allow us entry into an underground, officially banned view of Vietnamese society we are unlikely to get anywhere else but in poems. “Boiled – Steamed – Raw” is very fine work.

- Dan Bellm, poet, translator, and author of Practice and Buried Treasure

Hearty congratulations, Kelly!

Kelly Morse is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, and translator. Her creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in Brevity, Alimentum, Quarter After Eight and elsewhere, while her translations have appeared in Asymptote. A graduate of Boston University’s MFA program, she has had work nominated for Best of the Net, and she is a Vermont Studio Center fellowship recipient.

Ryan Wilson (poetry '08) has had an impressively productive year: he's published work in a slew of places and received a number of prizes, all while being a doctoral candidate.

His original poem, "Beatus Ille," and translation of Horace I.25 appear in the new issue of Measure.  His lecture, “How to Think Like a Poet,” is featured in the new issue of Dappled Things, and his essay, “Rich Refusals: Donald Justice and the New Critics” appeared in the Winter issue of The Sewanee Review.  

His poem “The View on Waking” appeared in the October issue of First Things, while another poem, “Pike County, 1980s, Evening,” appears in the most recent Raintown Review, and his light-verse piece, “An Orwellian Aubade” is in the most recent issue of Light.

In addition, he was named a finalist for the Vassar Miller Book Prize this year, as well as for the Morton Marr Prize from the Southwest Review, and he received an Honorable Mention in the Frost Farm Poetry Prize.

Hearty congratulations, Ryan!

Ryan Wilson was born in Griffin, Georgia. He holds graduate degrees from The Johns Hopkins University and Boston University. His work has appeared in numerous journals, such as 32 Poems, Able Muse, First Things, The Hopkins Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Measure, River Styx, The Sewanee Review, Sewanee Theological Review, and Unsplendid. Currently he is a doctoral candidate at The Catholic University of America, and he lives in Baltimore with his wife.