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SLS Lithuania Contest

East-European Roots: New Writing on the Old World

 

This year's inaugural SLS Eastern European Roots Non-Fiction Contest has declared its winners. Out of 200 very strong entries, judge Phillip Lopate couldn't narrow the field to only 3, so we have a tie for 3rd. Here are the results (bios below):


1st Place
Nikita Nelin "The Most Current History of the Russian Jew"

2nd Place
Daniella Gitlin "Notes From the Basin"

3rd Place (tie)
Steven Roiphe "Brighton Beach Memory Gap"
Randall Babtkis "Three Meditations"

Mr. Nelin will receive free tuition, airfare, and accommodations to SLS Lithuania. Ms. Gitlin will receive free tuition to the program, and Mr. Roiphe and Mr. Babtkis will receive a 50% tuition fellowship. Congratulations to the winners and all the entrants. You too can come join us in Lithuania. There are some spots still available for the program, including the groundbreaking Jewish Lithuania/Litvak Experiences parallel program. Faculty this summer in Vilnius includes: Robin Hemley, Edward Hirsch, Joseph Kertes, Rebecca Seiferle, Rachel Kostanian, Regina Kopilevich, Vytautas Toleikis, Efraim Zuroff, and more.

Thank you to every one who entered!

First Place


Nikita Nelin was born in 1980 in Moscow, Russia. With his mother, he emigrated in 1989 and spent the following year moving West through Europe. Since 1990 he has lived all over the US, continuing in the itinerant spirit of his emigration. After a series of odd jobs and a long hiatus in his education, Nikita went back to college in 2004. He studied Psychology and Russian Studies and graduated with Honors from Bard College in Northern New York. He began writing stories in 2007 and has read in Brooklyn, Northern New York, and Ireland. He was a semi-finalist for the 2010 Sozopol writing seminar, and won the 2010 Sean O’Faolain prize. Currently Nikita is finishing MFA in creative writing at Brooklyn College, where he also teaches.

Second Place


Daniella Gitlin grew up in New York and received her B.A. from Princeton University in 2006. She lived and worked in Buenos Aires on a fellowship for a year following graduation, and worked for Seven Stories Press in the editorial department for three years. She is currently a third-year MFA candidate in the Nonfiction Writing program at Columbia University and is writing a thesis about her personal and political connections to Israel, where she was born. Daniella teaches expository writing to first-year undergraduates at Columbia, and her translation of the 1957 literary nonfiction classic, Operación Masacre, by Rodolfo Walsh, is forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in 2013. Her translation of Pablo Martín Ruiz's "Epifanías del Danubio" appeared in the inaugural issue of Asymptote journal.

Third Place (tie)

Randall Babtkis, MFA (Columbia University), is the founder of an early free media, cross-genre work, The Telephone Project, produced in Venice, CA. He served as editor of Columbia: A Magazine of Poetry and Prose and taught writing workshops for the Academy of American Poets in New York. He recently codirected the graduate writing program at New College of California and now teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies where he is editor of Mission At Tenth, an interdisciplinary arts print journal. Randall has published a chapbook, Banister, and contributed to national publications ranging from The Quarterly to Slash Magazine. Recent work can be found in The Columbia Review and Five Fingers Review. Randall has written short pieces on Editorial Revision As An Act Of Exploration, Eudora Welty, The Writer as a Listening Thief, and Beryl Bainbridge for the CIIS Integral Education blog.

Steven Roiphe studied creative writing, literature, and history at Harvard College. He lives in Downeast Maine, where he is writing a novel that explores homosexuality and espionage during the American Revolution.

 

CONTEST JUDGE

JUDGE: Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a BA from Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate from the Union Graduate School in 1979. He has written three personal essay collections --Bachelorhood (Little, Brown, 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Poseidon-Simon & Schuster, 1989), andPortrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996); two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975); a collection of his movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically (Doubleday-Anchor); an urbanist meditation, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan (Crown, 2004); and a biographical monograph, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and Filmmaker (Harry N. Abrams, 2004.) In addition, there is a Phillip Lopate reader, Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003).

He has edited the following anthologies: The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday-Anchor, 1994); Writing New York(Library of America, 1998), Journey of a Living Experiment (Virgil Press, 1979), a best essays of the year series, The Anchor Essay Annual (1997-99), and the forthcoming American Movie Critics (Library of America, 2006). His essays, fiction, poetry, film and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories (1974), The Best American Essays (1987), several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Threepenny Review, Double Take, New York Times, Harvard Educational Review, Preservation, Cite, 7 Days, Metropolis, Conde Nast Traveler, and many other periodicals and anthologies.

He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, a Texas Institute of Letters award in the best non-fiction book of the year category for Bachelorhood , and was a finalist for the PEN best essay book of the year award for Portrait of My Body. His anthology, Writing New York, received a citation from the New York Society Library and honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award.

After working with children for twelve years as a writer in the schools, he taught creative writing and literature at Fordham, Cooper Union, University of Houston, and New York University. He currently holds the John Cranford Adams Chair at Hofstra University, and also teaches in the MFA graduate programs at Columbia, the New School and Bennington.