Bonnie Auslander Writer, La Napoule writer's residency Annie Dillard once observed that all writers have inside them a child whose voice is particularly powerful and eloquent. The trick, she says, is to figure out the age of that child. Dillard's observation made me reflect on poems I've written in the voice a 12-year-old and helped me recognize that for me these poems hold particular energy and force. Accordingly, I have made pre-adolescence the focus of my poetry manuscript, The New Dog Map of the World, and of a novel, tentatively titled Jordan and Jessie and Me. Both the novel and the poetry manuscript explore the transition from the more authentic selves of childhood to the less genuine ones of adolescence, followed by the adult attempt to return to that earlier authenticity." Bonnie Auslander has an MFA in creative writing (poetry) from the University of Massachusetts. She has published essays and poems in a number of newspapers and literary journals; among her honors are being twice named to the South Carolina Academy of Authors Fellowship in poetry. She lives in Durham, where she is a lecturer at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Return to the NC Artist Grant Award Recipients for 1997-98
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