Fairfield University faculty member receives nomination for ‘Oscar of the magazine world’ for touching essay on Sandy Hook Elementary School tragedy

Fairfield University Assistant Professor of English Carol Ann Davis, of Sandy Hook, Conn., was recently named a finalist for “the Oscars” of magazine awards - the 2015 National Magazine Awards (NMA), for her deeply intimate, community-minded meditation on the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre. She received a nomination in the Essays and Criticism category for “The One I get and Other Artifacts.”

The National Magazine Awards, given in some two-dozen categories by the American Society of Magazine Editors and administered by the Columbia University School of Journalism, represent the highest honor bestowed within the industry. The other finalists in Essays and Criticism for the 49th edition of the NMAs are The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Virginia Quarterly Review.

The winner of the award will be announced at a gala ceremony in New York City on February 2. Davis’ essay appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of The Georgia Review , and the magazine and its editor, Stephen Corey, are nominated alongside Davis for first publishing the piece.

The day after the gala, Davis and Corey will discuss the writing and editing process, the nomination, and the awards ceremony during a unique gathering slated for 4 p.m. on Tuesday, February 3 in the Kelley Presentation Room in the Aloysius P. Kelley S.J. Center on Fairfield’s campus. The public is invited to this free event, which will include a question-and-answer period and a reception.

In her essay, Davis, a resident of Sandy Hook, Connecticut at the time of the shootings, describes the events of December 14, 2012 from the perspective of a parent whose children attend a school nearby; the essay examines what it is to experience proximity to tragedy and to live in its aftermath. Corey wrote in his introductory remarks about the issue that Davis “has found a way to speak meaningfully and distinctively about a moment in history that still drives nearly all the rest of us to angry or weeping silence.”

Carol Ann Davis, who joined Fairfield’s faculty in 2012, is co-founder of the Newtown Poetry Project, a Fairfield-University sponsored poetry program that brings Newtown 2 ^nd -6 ^th graders and their parents together for a free six-week poetry workshop each spring and publishes an annual collection of poems. She has published primarily as a poet, with two collections from Tupelo Press, Psalm (2007) and Atlas Hour (2011). She is the recipient of the W.K. Rose Fellowship in the Creative Arts from Vassar College and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry. She has also worked on the other side of the now-mythical transom, serving as editor of the literary journal Crazyhorse at the College of Charleston from 2001–2012. Davis teaches in Fairfield’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. For more info, see http://www.fairfield.edu/academics/schoolscollegescenters/collegeofartssciences/graduateprograms/mfaincreativewriting/faculty/

The Georgia Review , published at the University of Georgia since 1947, won the NMA in Fiction in 1986 and for Essays in 2007, and it has been a finalist 19 times in various categories since first entering the NMA competition in 1985.