2017 Paul Gruchow Essay Contest Winner, Alice D’Allesio
Alice D’ Allesio is the winner of the 2017 Paul Gruchow Contest for her essay “Tending the Valley.” Congrats Alice. She is a Middleton poet whose poems often reflect the wonder of the natural world, and/or the environmentalist’s vision. Social/political commentary and family/love relationships are also favorite subjects, rendered with a serious or light touch. Her poems have been published in the Wisconsin Academy Review, Earth’s Daughters, North Coast Review, Ariel, Free Press, The Kerf, Fox Cry Review, Verse Wisconsin, and others. They have won awards from The Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets and Wisconsin Regional Writers, and she was a runner-up in the Wisconsin Academy Review Poetry Contest in 2002.
Taylor is an essayist living in Ames, Iowa. His work has appeared in Orion, the Northern Plains Ethics Journal, High Country News, The Huffington Post, among others. His chapbook of poems, Ruin: Elegies from the Bakken, is published by Red Bird Chapbooks, and he is currently editing the country’s first anthology of creative writing about fracking, Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America, through Ice Cube Press.
Cindy Crosby is the author of seven books, and contributor to eight others. Her books have been reviewed by Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Sun Times, Orion, Chicago Wilderness, Chicagoland Gardening, and various other publications. Her second book, By Willoway Brook, (with a foreword by Paul Gruchow) was named as of Chicago Wilderness magazine’s “great reads” in 2006. Cindy has written more than five hundred articles, reviews, and poems for many periodicals and websites, and she reviewed books for Publishers Weekly for almost a decade.
Coleen Johnston‘s poem “In Spring” appeared in Speakeasy (Summer 2005), and her poetry has been featured in the Art and Poetry Collaboration of Crossings at Carnegie since 2002. Her essay “Walking Brule” won honorable mention in the 2005 Minnesota Literature Essay Contest. She is the author of four books, Garage Sale Decorator: A Pennypincher’s Shopping and Decorating Guide (Betterway Publications, 1989) and The Founders, The Guardians and The Inheritors, a historical fiction trilogy (St. Martin’s Press 1993-94). Johnston holds a B.S. in English from the University of Wisconsin-River Falls. She lives near Mazeppa, Minnesota, with husband Bruce, and is currently editing the memoir of two years in her woodland garden.
Virginia M. Wright-Peterson has written extensively about her native Minnesota homeland and places abroad. Her co-winning essay, “The Natural and Unnatural History of Marion Township, is part of “Finding Ourselves in Empty Places,” a collection of essays that trace her journey through the Midwest with her young daughter in the wake of her husband’s death from leukemia.
Patricia Monaghan is the author of four books of poetry, most recently “Homefront,” on the effect of war on families; and of several books of nonfiction including “The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog,” an ecospiritual journey around Ireland. She is associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at DePaul University in Chicago and Senior Fellow of the Black Earth Institute, a progressive think-tank dedicated to reconnecting arts, spirituality, and the environment. She was awarded a Pushcart Prize in 2004 and the Phoenix Award for environmental poetry in 2003.
Sue Leaf of Center City, Minnesota won the 2007 Paul Gruchow Essay Contest with her essay To Love the World. Honorable Mention went to Coleen L. Johnston of Mazeppa, MN for her essay Foreigner.