FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

CONTACT: Susie P. Gonzalez

susie.gonzalez@trinity.edu

April 14, 2009

Trinity University Press Director is Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

SAN ANTONIO – Barbara Ras, a poet and director of the Trinity University Press, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.  Ms. Ras was among 180 Fellows chosen from nearly 3,000 applicants in the fields of art, science, and scholarship in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation’s 85^th annual competition.

Guggenheim Fellows are appointed on the basis of stellar achievement and exceptional promise for continued accomplishment. Ms. Ras revitalized the dormant Trinity University Press in 2002. In the fall of 2009, the Press will celebrate its fifth anniversary of publishing books under its imprint. The Press has been recognized as “a publisher to watch for intriguing books” and its publications have won many distinctions and awards.

During her 25 years in publishing, Ms. Ras has worked at North Point Press, Sierra Club Books, the University of California Press, and the University of Georgia Press.  Books she edited at the University of Georgia Press were nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for three years in a row, and another of her titles won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing.

Concurrent with her publishing career, Ms. Ras has pursued her own creative work as a poet.  In 1997, she won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, perhaps the most prestigious first-book prize in the country.  Her manuscript, Bite Every Sorrow, which was published by the LSU Press, went on to win the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and win Ms. Ras recognition as Georgia Poet of the Year for 1999.

Ms. Ras’ second collection of poems, One Hidden Stuff, was published by Penguin in 2006, appeared on the Poetry Foundation's bestseller list, and was widely praised in reviews. Her third book, The Last Skin, will be published by Penguin in 2010.

Her poems have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, including the New Yorker, Tri-Quarterly, The American Scholar, Massachusetts Review, Orion, Gulf Coast, Salmagundi, and Five Points.  She has also published a collection of Costa Rican fiction in translation, Costa Rica: A Literary Traveler's Companion, published by Whereabouts Press.

Ms. Ras received her B.A. from Simmons College and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Oregon. She will complete her fourth book during the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Since its establishment in 1925 the Guggenheim Foundation has granted more than $273 million in Fellowships to nearly 16,700 individuals.  Previous recipients have included Ansel Adams, W. H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes, Henry Kissinger, Vladimir Nabokov, Isamu Noguchi, Linus Pauling, Philip Roth, Paul Samuelson, Wendy Wasserstein, Derek Walcott, James Watson, and Eudora Welty.

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