Dennis Trudell grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., and
has lived for many years in Madison,
Wisconsin. He is editor of
Full Court: A Literary Anthology of Basketball (Breakaway Books) and winner of the Pollak Prize national competition for
Fragments in Us: Recent & Earlier Poems (University of Wisconsin Press). The book received an “Outstanding Achievement” citation from the Wisconsin Library Association. He has published 9 chapbooks of poetry, including the recent
Marquees in Buffalo: Movies in Poems & Prose Poems. His poems have appeared in
20 anthologies including Garrison Keillor’s 2005 Poems for Hard Times (Viking Penguin)
and Encores
in 2006 (Parallel Press). He has published poems in many journals, including
Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Madison Review, New England Review, Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Progressive, TriQuarterly,
etc.
Fragments in Us:
Recent & Earlier Poems
Winner of the 1996 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry Selected by Philip Levine
Hardcover
ISBN: 0299152103
Paperback
ISBN: 0299152146
Publisher:
University of Wisconsin Press
September 1, 1996
73 pp
Full
Court:
A Literary Anthology of Basketball Hardcover
ISBN: 1558215042
Publisher: Breakaway Books
September 1996
353 pp
Glorifying the wild rhythm and grace of the game, and the place basketball has in our hearts, this anthology includes writers such as John Updike, John Edgar
Wideman, Sherman Alexie, and Bobbie Ann Mason.
Trudell's
short stories have been published in Aethlon: The Journal
of Sport Literature, Chariton Review, Kansas
Quarterly/Arkansas Review, Notre Dame Review, Ohio Review,
Prism International (Canada), Quarry West, Western
Humanities Review, etc. More recent stories have
appeared in North American Review (“Sticking Pins
in the Chancellor”) -- nominated for the 2005 Pushcart
Prize: Best of the Small Presses -- and in Ontario
Review (“Wish You Weren’t Here: Selected 20-Centry
Postcards”). His “Gook” was included in an O. Henry
Prize yearly anthology, and his stories have twice received
“Distinctive Stories of the Year” listing in Best
American Short Stories, plus a “Special Mention” in
an earlier Pushcart Prize. He edited and published From
the Bottom: Writing From Wisconsin State Prison, Waupun
after stints of teaching and volunteering as a workshop
leader there. He later tutored and taught creative
writing at the federal prison near Oxford, Wisconsin. In
1996 he edited Full Court: A Literary Anthology of
Basketball for Breakaway Books of New York. It is still
widely considered the most complete gathering of short
fiction and poetry about the sport. Trudell recently won
Madison Magazine's $500 first prize for his short story
"Kid Noir," to be published in November 2006.
Available Poetry Chapbooks
Marquees of Buffalo:
Movies in Prose & Prose Poems
Paperback
ISBN: 1-893311-35-x
Publisher: Parallel Press
32 pp.
Dennis Trudell studied under Paul Bennett at Denison
University in Ohio, and with Bryan MacMahon and Nelson Algren at the
University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, earning an MFA in
fiction writing. He taught at
University of Hawaii,
Susquehanna University, Case Western Reserve University, and for 17 years at
University of Wisconsin - Whitewater before his recent
retirement. He is a past winner of an NEA fellowship for poetry and two Wisconsin Arts Board grants. He is married to research archivist and genealogist Dee Grimsrud; the two have six grandchildren in Madison and Arizona.
Trudell has currently under
submission a manuscript of poetry, another of stories and
poems about basketball - The Way the Ball Hung There, and
a fiction manuscript, The Yard and 80 Other Stories. The title novella is set in a Buffalo suburb much like where he grew up. The other stories, each between two and five pages long, occur in places in the U. S. he has visited or at least passed through. Three of those short-short stories appear below.
He’d like to believe he occasionally rises to Bernard Malamud’s
advice: “Write your heart out.” He values writing that calls for a more just, humane U.S. and world community than seems the present direction.
