California College of the Arts (CCA) announces the launch of the IMPACT Social Entrepreneurship Awards. The program will enable interdisciplinary teams of CCA students to develop and implement social innovations through their studies in art, architecture, design, and writing. Three IMPACT Awards up to $10,000 each will be given annually, beginning in spring 2011.

Congratulations to CCA alumna Robin Powlesland (MFA Writing 2005), who was recently named a finalist in the 2010 Omnidawn Chapbook Poetry contest, a prestigious small-press award, for her work verbs without a past. Powlesland currently resides in Taos, New Mexico, and is an adjunct faculty member at the University of New Mexico–Taos.

The five Omnidawn finalists (listed below in alphabetical order) were selected by Elizabeth Robinson:

• The City Salutes Itself by Jackie Clark (Jersey City, NJ)

Paul McCarthy's Low Life Slow Life
Hatje Cantz, 2010
Paperback, 640 pages, $75

The Best Travel Writing 2010
Travelers' Tales, 2010
Paperback, 352 pages, $19.95

In "12 Hours in Barcelona" Writing & Literature professor Marianne Rogoff has a dusk-till-dawn layover in the city of Gaudi. She leaves her bags in an airport locker, buses to the center of town, and finds herself one among many on a festival occasion, out "on a night when free ballets and symphonies and theatrical performances are taking place all over town, lending a glow, heightening our pleasure, focusing the eye out of the chaos of so-much-to-see into the framework of the arts: dance, music, language. Over there, young spoken-word poets are rapping hip-hop beats; here, it's Shakespeare in Spanish; now, a celebratory speech; in my ear, the stories of Barcelona's past and future. I see it all from my perch atop this slow-moving red bus."