Join us for something rather special: Austin Community College’s Creative Writing Department will be introducing us to the two winners of their 2015 Balcones Prize: writer Margaret Malone, whose debut short story collection People Like You won the Fiction Prize; and Michael Wiegers, editor of What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, which won the Poetry Prize.

In Margaret Malone’s debut story collection, characters in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies, are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. Final judge John Blair called the book ‘a masterfully minimalist collection of lives lived poorly but with the best of intentions. Her stories are powerful, sad, and plain-spoken, and this debut collection takes the normative-yet-desperate circuits of the day-to-day that Bobbie Anne Mason and Frederick Barthelme brought to the forefront of American short fiction and makes them both new again and powerfully affecting. These are marvelous and worthy stories, and very much deserving of recognition.’

Malone’s writing has appeared in The Missouri Review, Oregon Humanities Magazine, Coal City Review, Propeller Quarterly, The Timberline Review, Swink, Nailed and latimes.com. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and Literary Arts, two Regional Arts & Culture Council Project Grants, and residencies at The Sitka Center and Soapstone. Malone has a degree in Philosophy from Humboldt State University and has taught creative writing as a visiting artist at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives with her husband filmmaker Brian Padian and two children in Portland, where she co-hosts the artist and literary gathering SHARE. (Photo by Sabina Poole.)

Michael Wiegers is poetry editor of Narrative Magazine and executive editor of Copper Canyon Press. His previous titles include This Art, The Poet’s Child and Reversible Monuments: Contemporary Mexican Poetry (co-edited with Monica de la Torre).