Jack Mulvaney, a Brookwood graduate, recently won a $1,500 prize from the Winona State University English Department for his poem, “Airing Out My Poetry.”
The gift is intended to encourage students in their writing and literary pursuits while helping them financially to reach their educational goals.
Manuscripts are screened by the creative writing faculty, and the final judges in each genre (fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction) are visiting writers from the John S. Lucas Great River Reading Series or other acclaimed authors published in the appropriate genre. The winners are published in the WSU literary and arts magazine Satori.
Mulvaney said regarding his piece, “Winona State University has given the creative writer in me various avenues to explore. In the play/script writing course taught by Dr. Weber, I created worlds and explored ideas that collected dust in my head for years. Planting those ideas on paper, they sprouted a tree that produced some fruit and gave me plenty of practice in pruning branches. In poetry writing, taught by Dr. Boulton, I experimented with poetry for the first time and injected my poetry with a childlike intuition, which has been an incredibly satisfying experience. These courses gave me skills I will take throughout my professional career and any creative endeavor I set sail toward.”
Judge Michael Torres offered these comments on Mulvaney’s poem: “What my favorite poems do so well, so precisely, is slow down a moment — the more seemingly mundane the better—by breaking it open and using what’s inside for play. Jack Mulvaney’s poem “Airing out my poetry” does exactly that. The poet takes us through what would otherwise be the mindless chore of doing one’s laundry. With a direct and accessible approach to language that manages to feel honest and vulnerable the whole time, the readers get a peek into the life of the speaker — their frustrations over soaked dollar bills that speak to their socio-economic situation, their wandering imagination that leads to the set of a Tarantino film. And despite the poem’s potential to remain in its pessimistic state, the poet ends with a humorously believable and even uplifting image of the speaker wearing “clean socks and a lavender-scented sweater.”
Mulvaney is the son of Pat and Denise Hedrick of rural Norwalk and the grandson of Peg Hedrick of Wilton.
