English alumnus wins literary review contest, thesis to be published

• April 27, 2010 9:30am

Fall Ends Tomorrow, Eric Neuenfeldt’s MA English ’09 thesis, has won the Iron Horse Literary Review Collection contest at Texas Tech University and will be published by them in June.

Mark Richard, fiction writer and contest judge, wrote:

"Eric Neuenfeldt slowly deep-freezes his characters in the black ice of a Milwaukee winter: the paint-huffing bike mechanics, the alcoholic teachers performing phantom lunch duty, parents with children living in storage units, a manure-shoveler trying to save his addicted brother from the abyss. . . His characters are not even bottom-dwellers, they are basement – and ditchbank – dwellers living in all that dirty snow, and filthy ice. The trick is, come spring, who will shake it off and stumble on the thaw, and who will remain fixed and disintegrate into the permanent landscape?"

Said Susan Gubnernat, English associate professor, “Those of us who have worked with him recognize Richard's descriptions as spot on. We should all rejoice in Eric's success so early on in his writing career.”

Iron Horse Literary Review is a journal of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction  published six times a year at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Neruenfeldt is currently pursuing a MFA on fellowship at Oklahoma State University. While at Cal State East Bay, he edited the inaugural issue of the English Department’s national literary review, “The Arroyo.”

DD