The Before Columbus Foundation has announced the winners of its 35th Annual American Book Awards. The prestigious American Book Awards were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. The purpose of the awards is to recognize literary excellence without limitations or restrictions.

Tanya Olson, a lecturer in UMBC’s English department, received a 2014 American Book Award for her book Boyishly, published by YesYes Books in May 2013. The book is a collection of poems which explores personal and public constructions of gender, violence, and America and it received the following review from “Good Reads”:

“Tanya Olson’s BOYISHLY is a magic book. It casts a spell upon you. Olson uses language like Gertrude Stein does, building large monuments of sound into humming lattices, where a ‘whale will do as a whale will do, ‘ or where ‘tree forms shapes for tiger’ and ‘tiger takes shape / under tree.’ In this book, Olson writes poems to a future America from beyond the planetary gravestone, where there is only a ‘boyish summer’ and the ‘boyish waters.’ The voice says come back to me. I am not done with you. I was waiting for you all along.”–Dorothea Lasky

Olson will be formally recognized for her award on Sunday, October 26 at the SF Jazz Center, Joe Henderson Lab in San Francisco, California. For more information on the 2014 American Book Awards and to see the complete list of recipients, click here. You can read more about the Before Columbus Foundation here.

Assistant Professor Gary Rozanc was awarded funding from the prestigious AIGA DEC Design Faculty Research Grant program. Professor Rozanc’s grant project is “Web Designer Competencies Inventory and Recommendations for Inclusion in Design Curricula.”

His research will help identify and validate sets of core competencies that need to be effectively taught to students preparing to pursue careers as interaction and user experience designers. He will interview a select group of interaction design educators and professionals to determine, contextualize and prioritize these competencies.

Gary Rozanc is an Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design emphasis, in the Department of Visual Arts.