THE MERRIAM-FRONTIER AWARD

H.G. Merriam

2009 WINNER ANNOUNCED

The Department of English at The University of Montana is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2009 Merriam-Frontier Award is Sara Pevar (First Year MFA in Fiction). Pevar will receive $500 and the Creative Writing Program will sponsor the publication of her manuscript submission. Pevar’s work was selected by a panel of judges consisting of Ginny Merriam, Lois Welch and Rob Schlegel.

Thank you to all who submitted your exceptional manuscripts of poetry, short fiction and non-fiction to the competition, and for your interest in and support of the Merriam-Frontier Award. We wish you the best of luck, and encourage all who are eligible to send work to the 2010 Merriam-Frontier Award; applications will be considered in the Fall of 2009.

The Merriam-Frontier Award was established by H.G. Merriam, Professor of English and Creative Writing from 1919-1954 at the University of Montana, to recognize distinguished achievement in writing. The award consists of a prize of $500.00 and publication of the winning entry.

Entries should be in one of the following categories:
Poetry: 20-25 poems
Fiction: 2 or more stories (40-60 double-spaced pages)
Essay: 2 or more essays (40-60 double-spaced pages)

The writer must be an undergraduate or graduate student enrolled at The University of Montana during the fall of 2009. The 2010 submission deadline is Friday, September 25, 2009 at 5 p.m.; the winner will be announced Monday, February 1, 2010. The recipient of the Merriam-Frontier Award will give a public reading on Monday, March 22, 2010 from his or her prize-winning manuscript. The recipient may publish only the winning manuscript with Merriam-Frontier funds, and the deadline for publication is August 1, 2010.

Frontier—later titled Frontier and Midland—was a distinguished quarterly journal founded and edited by H.G. Merriam and published at The University of Montana from 1920 to 1939. Contributors included then-emerging talents Wallace Stegner, A.B. Guthrie Jr., William Saroyan, Dorothy Johnson, John Mason Brown, Weldon Kees, Thomas McGrath and many others. One particular strength of Frontier was its frequent publication of work by young authors, a custom which the Merriam-Frontier Award both honors and continues.

A Wyoming native, H.G. Merriam arrived in Missoula in 1919, fresh from two degrees at Oxford where he had been in the first class of American Rhodes Scholars. He started his first class in creative writing in 1920, with five students; together they founded a literary magazine which became Frontier magazine. Even at that point, he was interested in the culture of the Pacific Northwest, encouraging all the arts but especially literature, until his death in 1980 at 96.

H.G. was responsible for creating a Bachelor's degree in creative writing beginning in 1929. It was the second of its kind in the United States (Harvard, where he had also studied, being the first.) The Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing was established and approved in 1964, guided by then-chair Warren Carrier (MFA, Iowa). H.G. also ran summer writing conferences in the 1930's and 40's with such luminous individuals as Carl Sandburg, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Bernard Malamud and Mildred Walker.

In the words of William Kittredge, "If it hadn't been for him, Montana wouldn't have been a literary state."

H.G. himself established the Merriam-Frontier Award in 1965, endowed primarily by Frontier magazine.

He retired in 1954, and passed away in 1980. The first award was granted to Frances Kuffel, a senior in English at the time, in 1982, for a volume of poems.