Your Big Break?
The Review Fiction Contest
How many people can identify with Wayne Caldwell’s
story? You feel a knack for stringing words together,
you get some encouragement from friends, you try
your hand at it and you send what you’ve written off to the
folks who make books and magazines. Not all of them respond,
and the ones who do fill up your recycling bin with rejections.
It can be disheartening. Caldwell, a 1969 alumnus, had cut
his writing back to “hobby” status when he saw an ad for a fiction contest and decided to take another shot.
Caldwell, now with a successful novel behind him and
another on the way, will be one of the deciding judges in the
Review’s 2008 fiction contest. And Caldwell — the winner of
our 1999 contest — would tell you, this just may be where it
starts.
The winner gets a $500 prize, has his or her submission
published in the magazine next summer and, just maybe, gets
noticed.
Here are the details:
The contest is open to members of the General Alumni
Association, alumni, current undergraduate and graduate
students and UNC faculty and staff. GAA employees, their
immediate family members and members of the GAA’s
Board of Directors are not eligible.
Submissions should be previously unpublished.
Writers are encouraged to include in their submissions an
element related to the state of North Carolina, its culture,
people or places.
Electronic submissions of 2,500 words or less should be sent
to car@unc.edu by midnight Feb. 1. Multiple submissions
from individual writers are permitted. These should be sent
in separate e-mail messages. In lieu of electronic submissions,
double-spaced, typed manuscripts of 2,500 words will be
accepted. These should be mailed, with a postmark no later
than Feb. 1, to Carolina Alumni Review Fiction Contest,
P.O. Box 660, Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514-0660.
All entries should include an accompanying page with the
writer’s name, preferred e-mail address, postal address, phone
number and the story title.
Second place will be awarded $250, and third place will
receive $100. The top three finishers also will be published
on the GAA’s Web site.
Caldwell and novelists Pamela Duncan ’ 83 and Howard
Owen ’ 71 will be the deciding judges, assisted by members of
the Review staff and a few alumni with writing expertise.
Questions? Let us know at car@unc.edu.
Caldwell
Duncan
Owen
UNC Loses Leader in Computing
to Private Sector
Dan Reed, founder of an ambitious Triangle universities
consortium known as the Renaissance Computing Institute, has left the University to take a position with
Microsoft Research. Reed, who also was Chancellor’s Eminent
Professor and senior adviser for strategy and innovation to the
chancellor, was considered a major catch for UNC when he was
lured from the University of Illinois in 2003.
“It’s a big loss for us,” said Tony Waldrop ’ 74, vice chancellor
for research and economic development. “Dan is a real visionary
and accomplished so much with RENCI. But it’s a wonderful
opportunity with Microsoft — it’s the perfect job and he’s the
perfect person for the job.”
Reed left to direct Microsoft’s work in the transition to multiple processors per chip and the emergence of large-scale data centers that deliver Web-based services. “I have been an academic and
high-performing computing researcher all of my professional life,”
Reed said in a RENCI news release. “However, the chance to
affect the future of computing on the largest scale at Microsoft
was irresistible.”
Reed came from Illinois with a vision: “A multi-disciplinary
institute that leveraged computing to enrich and empower
research and education, support economic development and
advance social issues,” Reed said. RENCI is Reed’s vision realized.
The program began in 2004 and is supported by seed money
from UNC, Duke University and N.C. State University.
“Basically we were put together to bring together multi-disciplinary groups to solve problems important to the state and to use
cutting-edge technologies in addressing these problems,” said
Karen Green, director of communications and outreach for
RENCI.
These problems include but are not limited to responding to
natural disasters, issues related to health care delivery and enhancing biomedical research, Green said.
Green said losing Reed is a big loss for RENCI but not a hindering one.
“These kinds of things happen when you have someone with
an international reputation in a field such as Dan Reed,” she said.
“They’re going to get offers to go elsewhere, and sometimes those
offers are too good to turn down. But it doesn’t mean we’re
falling apart; we’re entering a new stage in our history. It started as
his vision … but the fact is that Dan Reed does not equal
RENCI, so that vision will continue.”
RENCI Deputy Director Alan Blatecky has been named the
interim director. Blatecky also has been with RENCI from the
start. Reed has been asked to become chair of RENCI’s national
scientific advisory board. “So we will not have lost him completely,” Waldrop said.
Reed’s influence will remain at RENCI as well, Green said. “I
think he pushed all of us to be the best we could, and I think we
appreciate that. I think most of us, if not all of us here, feel an
obligation to continue that and to keep it going. And we will.
There will be changes. But RENCI’s all about change. What we’re
doing one year and what we’re doing the next year are bound to
be different because we respond to the needs of the state.”
