A group of scholars and poets put Vanderbilt on the literary map almost a century ago with the publication of The Fugitive; the excitement coming out of the university’s writing program these days — Vanderbilt now has the single most exclusive MFA program in the country, as measured by the number of candidates it accepts compared to the number of applications it gets — suggests how that may have felt in the moment. A quick rundown, as reported on Chapter16.org: a prestigious Stegner Fellowship for poet Edgar Kunz; inclusion in the Best New Poets 2015 anthology for Kunz and Lisa Dordal; a Frost Place chapbook prize and an NEA grant (sorry, professors) for second-year graduate student Anders Carlson-Wee; and newly published novels by recent alums Matthew Baker and Bryn Chancellor. The capper: a Best New Poets 2015 slot for first-year graduate student Tiana Clark, as well as first-prize honors from the literary journal Rattle’s annual poetry competition — an award selected from some 15,000 entries that carries a $10,000 stipend.
