We are delighted to announce the winners of our three named scholarships. April Puciata has been awarded the Scotti Merrill Memorial Scholarship; Martha Otis has received the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award; and Patricia Engel has won the Marianne Russo Scholarship.

The annual scholarships are given by the Key West Literary Seminar to recognize excellence in a manuscript submission from a new or emerging writer. They provide full tuition to our 2009 Seminar and writers' workshop program, financial support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West, and an opportunity to appear onstage at the Seminar. We are sincerely grateful to Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida for the endowments which will continue to make these scholarships possible for years to come.

April Puciata, a poet, lives in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Mangrove, and Salonika. This will be her fifth visit to Key West and her first to the Seminar. Martha Otis lives in Miami and first visited Key West two years ago with her daughter. She teaches writing at the University of Miami and has published fiction in Best New American Voices 2000, the Indiana Review, and Moment Magazine. Patricia Engel also lives in Miami; she learned about the Seminar last year and attended a few of our free-and-open-to-the-public events. Her fiction has been published in Harpur Palate, Driftwood, Slice, and the Boston Review (here and here). In 2007, Engel was selected by Junot Díaz as Featured Emerging Fiction Writer at CLMP's "Periodically Speaking" at the New York Public Library.

Congratulations to April, Martha, and Patricia. We look forward to meeting you this January in Key West.