By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
A four-woman Dowagiac writing group came away from the Cranbrook Writers' Guild summer conference with a $125 poetry prize and a nickname.
Conference Director Rick Bailey, from Henry Ford Community College, dubbed the close-knit quartet of Jaime Courtney and her sister Maudie Walker, Elaine McKeough and Diane Marty the "Dowagiac mafia."
The group was established in April, according to McKeough.
It was Courtney, a former Daily News editor and veteran actor and director with Beckwith Theatre, who captured the poetry part of a competition which also evaluates fiction.
Writers, selected from juried submissions, live on campus with noted authors who guide and critique manuscripts and conduct workshops.
Courtney has had poems published in anthologies and been awarded honorable mentions, but she said Monday this is her first time to win a poetry prize.
"For a long time, poetry seemed like a lost art, but it's making a comeback," she said.
Of course, it was poetry – by the late Pulitzer Prize-winner Gwendolyn Brooks – which launched Dogwood Fine Arts Festival, before there were visiting authors, visual art, dancers, musicians or storytellers.
Courtney, who also writes fiction and plays, said they spent 2 1/2 days Aug. 3-5 in Bloomfield Hills, where writers have been polished since 1969, although prizes began last year.
Faculty have included Dowagiac visitor Joyce Carol Oates and Michigan crime novelist Elmore Leonard.
This year's resident writers were J. (for Jill) Allyn Rosser, a Bethlehem, Pa., native who grew up in Sparta, N.J., and teaches creative writing at Ohio University in Athens, for poetry, and Johnathan Rand, for fiction.
Rand's "American Chillers" series has topped 1 million sales with 18 titles aimed at kids ages 7-13. The former radio and TV personality lives in Topinabee in northern Michigan.
Rosser, who has won the Pushcart Prize, earned her doctorate in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She formerly taught at the University of Michigan.
Courtney said the conference attracts a wide range of ages from high school and college students to retired teachers.
Courtney said poetry fans need not venture as far as the Detroit area, as the Box Factory for the Arts in St. Joseph sponsors periodic readings.