The Writing Center’s Conor Bracken announced 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition winner among other accomplishments

Conor Bracken, assistant director for The Writing Center, recently had his poetry published in The New Yorker, and in the same week Bracken won the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition sponsored by Bull City Press.

After submitting five other works over the span of five years, Bracken’s poem “Damaged Villanelle” was selected to be featured in The New Yorker.

“It was a pretty great week,” Bracken said. “There have been maybe three moments when I’ve had that same physiological feeling of euphoria; when I got accepted into graduate school, when I married my wife and when I was accepted in The New Yorker. It’s been a poetry dream of mine as long as I can remember.”

The New Yorker, a magazine known for its reportage, commentary, attention to modern fiction, satire, cartoons and inclusion of short stories and poetry, has a wide readership outside of New York with more than half of its circulation in the top ten U.S. metropolitan areas.

“Even the most accomplished writers might spend their whole lives trying to get published in some of these venues,” said Travis Webster, director of The Writing Center. “He’s young, not too far out of his MFA and he’s already published in The New Yorker, which is just incredible.”

In the same week Bracken’s poem was published in The New Yorker, he was also named the winner of the 2017 Frost Place Chapbook Competition.

The Frost Place is a nonprofit educational center for poetry and the arts based at the late poet, Robert Frost’s old homestead in New Hampshire. For winning the chapbook competition, Bracken’s chapbook “Henry Kissenger, Mon Amour,” will be published by Bull City Press. Bracken has also received a full scholarship to attend the Frost Place Poetry Seminar and will have the opportunity to live and write in the Frost Place House-Museum for a week during peak fall foliage season in the White Mountains.

Bracken feels fortunate to be supported by the UHCL community, not only as someone who works in The Writing Center, but as a poet. Bracken stated how encouraging the Writing Center director, Travis Webster, is in pursuing other aspects of professional identity and indicated how this support and encouragement has impacted his success.

“If it weren’t for that [encouragement and support] I don’t know if I would be as successful,” Bracken said.

As a former graduate professor of Bracken, Webster expressed how proud he is of Bracken’s achievements.

“It’s been so fantastic watching him move from a budding graduate student with an early creative and research based repertoire moving into these really incredible venues,” Webster said. “Seeing his work showcased in these ways is fantastic. I think soon we’re going to say ‘we knew him when.’”

Read Bracken’s poem, “Damaged Villanelle,” here.

Also published on Medium.