Cal State East Bay Graduate Earns Major Literary Prize
- August 12, 2015
Cal State East Bay alumnus Eric Neuenfeldt was awarded a major national literary prize for his short story collection “Wild Horse.”
Neuenfeldt, who earned both his B.A. (2007) and M.A. (2009) at Cal State East Bay, won the from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) and will have his work published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2017.
On the AWP’s website, judge Nahid Rachlin critiqued Neuenfeldt’s award-winning work. “This well-crafted collection focuses on American-born characters — underclass, poor drifters,” Rachlin wrote. “Strewn, along with images of bums, cripples, addicts, gutted houses, trash-covered streets, and wrecked farms, are images of startling beauty. The depiction of the physically and psychologically injured characters achieves lightness because of the enchanting writing style, the fact that they usually deal with their situations stoically, and most of all the strain of humor running through the stories."
While at Cal State East Bay, Neuenfeldt founded “Arroyo,” the English department’s literary journal.
“(East Bay’s) graduate program was crucial to my intellectual development, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to work with the professors in the department,” he said in an email.
After graduating from CSUEB, Neuenfeldt attended the MFA program at Oklahoma State University, where he studied under the 2014 winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, Toni Graham. He received the Burris Fellowship and also served as associate editor of the award-winning literary journal the “Cimarron Review” while at OSU. He is currently a tenure-track English instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno, Nevada, and co-edits “The Meadow” literary magazine.
Neuenfeldt’s work has appeared in “The Paris Review Daily,” “Confrontation,” and “REAL: Regarding Arts & Letters.” He also won the 2010 Iron Horse Literary Review Single-Author competition.