Awards:
Katie Kingston has won the 2010 W. D. Snodgrass Fellowship given for Poetic Endeavor and Excellence. The cash prize is for tuition at the San Miguel Poetry Week in San Miguel de Allende in January of 2010. Snodgrass lived seasonally in San Miguel with his wife Kathy, a translator in her own right, both of whom were regular presenters at the conference.
Jake York’s book A Murmuration of Starlings has received the 2009 Colorado Book Award in Poetry. The book “is part of an ongoing project to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement”. Finalists were Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s Holding Three Things at Once and Pattiann Rogers’ Wayfarer. The awards were announced June 22, 2009, as part of the Aspen literary festival.
Mason Winner of Creativity in Motion Prize
Poet David Mason, a professor of English at Colorado College, recently was named the recipient of the 2009 Thatcher Hoffman Smith Creativity in Motion Prize, a biennial prize honoring the creative process given by the University of Oklahoma College of Arts and Sciences.
The $40,000 award will allow Mason to focus more time on creating the libretto for the opera adaptation of his verse novel Ludlow which won the Colorado Book Award in Poetry in 2008.
Mason previously teamed with composer Lori Laitman for the 2008 opera "Scarlet Letter," her first full-length opera. This will be their second project together. "For years, I have been wishing to enlarge what poets could do by creating bigger dramas than are usually found in our poetry," Mason said. "Opera may be the perfect arena in which to accomplish this task." Mason will be honored at an event to be held in September.
J. Michael Martinez, a writing instructor in English at the Univ. of Northern Colorado has been awarded the 2009 Walt Whitman Award by the Academy of American Poets for his book-length collection of poems, Heredities, which will be published in spring 2010.
Besides winning an American Book Award (see item below), L. Luis Lopez’ Each Month I Sing (Farrolito Press, 2008)has received the EVVY 1st place award for poetry by the Colorado Independent Publishers Association (CIPA) at their 15th annual awards presentation.
The co-winners of the 20089 National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry are Juan Felipe Herrera for “Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (Univ. of Arizona Press), a collection from his twelve collections of poetry, and August Kleinzahler’s Sleeping it Off in Rapid City (Farrar, Strauss).
As Rigoberto Gonzalez writes, “Juan Felipe Herrera is one of Chicano literature’s most recognized and critically acclaimed writers.” Herrera’s book demonstrates his “rich and varied poetics, from the political to the playful…informed by his participation in the cultural and historical Chicano Movement of the 1960s, by a strong influence from Allen Ginsberg and the Beat Generation, and by an awareness of Mexico’s intimate and conflicted relationship with the U.S.” “…Herrera inhabits, critiques and re-imagines the borderlands between Spanish and English, barrio-speak and academic philology, Mesoamerican myth and popular culture, to give readers a unique and original lens through which to view contemporary society in the Americas.”
Stephen Burt has pointed out that August Kleinzahler’s “poems of guyhood, like his poems of travel (they are often the same poems), make fun of the very qualities they admire.” Kevin Prufer, board member of the NBCCA says: “And for all the sodium-lit airports and street corners, the highways and boardwalks, there lives beneath these hard-edged, free-verse poems both a knowing wink and an earnest longing for something better, for transcendence and beauty, even if they are only momentary.”
Veronica Patterson’s manuscript Thresh / Hold has been selected by poet Lola Haskins as the winner of the second annual Kenneth and Geraldine Gell Poetry Prize. The prize, for 2009, includes publication of the work in trade paperback by Big Pencil Press, an honorarium of $1000 payable upon publication, and a two-week fellowship at the Gell Center of the Finger Lakes, a retreat center in the Bristol Hills, Naples, New York.
M. D. Friedman’s audio poem, “A Good Dog,” was the overall winner of the Book Habit & New Zealand Poetry Society‘s 2008 Poetry Contest.http://www.poetscoop.org/media/GOODDOG.mp3
L. Luis Lopez of Grand Junction won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for Each Month I Sing (Farolito Press, 2008). Of the book, John Nizalowski says: “In this celebration of the yearly round, we find mythology, religion, art, culture, politics, nature, astronomy, the human condition, humor, and yes, even baseball. The poems ‘Salvador Quintana,’ ‘Encounter with La Lorona,’ and ‘Campbell’s Soup: A Villanelle for Andy Warhol’ are alone worth the price of admission. By giving us over 140 more poems, Lopez has presented us with a lyrical feast — his finest book to date.”
Kathryn Winograd was a 2008 Ann Stanford Poetry Prize finalist and a semi-finalist for the 2008 Center for Book Arts chapbook competition.
Katie Kingston has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by the editors of Isotope (Utah State University), for her poem, “Vista Verde.” In 2008, Kingston placed as a finalist in the May Swenson Poetry Award and the Rumi Prize for Poetry, as well as semi-finalist in the Zone 3 Press First Book Award and the Pablo Neruda Prize.
Samantha Stiers of Boulder, CO, won the 2008 Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award for “VS”. She received $1,000 and publication of her poem in Bitter Oleander. The annual award is given for a single poem. The next deadline is June 15 (www.bitteroleander.com).
(from Poets & Writers, Jan/Feb. 2009)
Cheryl Loetscher's poem “The Persistence of Hunger” won one of two Honorable Mentions and $250 in the Natchez Poetry contest judged by New Orleans poet, Andrea Young.M. D. Friedman’s audio poem, "A Good Dog," was the overall winner of the Book Habit & New Zealand Poetry Society 2008 Poetry Contest. Hear it at http://mdpoet.blogspot.com
Poetry West is delighted to announce that Lisa Lewis has won the 2007 chapbook competition. Her collection, Story Box, will be published by Poetry West in Fall 2008.
David Mason's Ludlow: A Verse Novel (Red Hen Press, 2007) won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry on Oct. 9, 2008, at the annual Colorado Humanities and Center for the Book gala in Denver.
Michele Harvey won Honorable Mention in this year's annual Einbond Renku contest, sponsered by the Haiku Society of America.
Stephen Beal, Colorado poet and fabric artist, has won The Lillian Elliott Award for Excellence in Fiber Art for 2008. Two of his embroidered canvases appeared in an exhibit (Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, 2007-08) at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. A portfolio of his work and his story “Needlepoint” appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Fiberarts. Portfolios of his work and interviews have appeared in the French magazine De fil en aiguille and Surface Design Journal. Visit his site at www.stephenbeal.com/index.html for a view!
Noah Eli Gordon’s Acoustic Experience has won the Pavement Saw Chapbook Contest, May, 2008. It will be available from Pavement Saw Press in June.