Sex Fantasy, Language Barrier, Anti-Gone, Comics for Choice and A Western World Nominated for Ignatz Awards
The Small Press Expo (SPX) has announced the 2018 Ignaz Awards nominees and Consortium titles are well represented! Sophia Foster-Dimino’s Sex Fantasy (Koyama Press) and Hannah K. Lee’s Language Barrier (Koyama Press) are nominated for Outstanding Collection. Comics for Choice, edited by Hazel Newlevant, Whit Taylor, and Sophia Foster-Dimino (Alternative Comics) is nominated for Outstanding Anthology. Connor Willumsen’s Anti-Gone (Koyama Books) is nominated for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Last but not least, Michael DeForge’s “Rhode Island Me” from A Western World (Koyama Press) is nominated for Outstanding Story. The winners will be announced on September 15. Congratulations and good luck to all these excellent authors!
Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers Wins Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
Our warmest congratulation to Craig Morgan Teicher, who has won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his third collection, The Trembling Answers (BOA Editions). Awarded by the Academy of American Poets since 1994, this $25,000 prize recognizes the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. The judges wrote of The Trembling Answers: it is “a collection as ecstatic as it is solemn, and what this poetry shares with us about love, faith, doubt, and poetry itself is essential. From a state of bewilderment to the condition of omniscience, Craig Morgan Teicher’s poetry stands simultaneously inside and outside of common understanding, struggling to un-domesticate the mind even as it seeks to more deeply inhabit the intimacies of domestic life. This is a book of unflinching self-scrutiny, by turns meditative, plainspoken, funny, and profound, where answers are not stable solutions but achingly alert responses to the trauma and triumph of human existence.” Bravo, Craig!
Geffrey Davis’s Night Angler Wins James Laughlin Award
We’re thrilled to announce that Geffrey Davis’s forthcoming second poetry collection Night Angler (BOA Editions, February 2019) is the winner of the 2018 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets! The Award has been given since 1954 to recognize and support a second book of poetry forthcoming in the next calendar year. Davis will receive a cash prize of $5,000 and a one-week residency at the Betsy Hotel in Miami; the Academy of American Poets also distributes copies of the book to thousands of its members. Of Night Angler, the judges wrote: “The hooked lines of Night Angler fish in the headwaters of memory and the riverine flow of the present. What we catch are poems about coming to terms with a drug-addicted father, coming of age as a ‘black boy’ in America, and coming through the ‘wilderness of worry’ as a husband and new parent amid racial violence and environmental injustice. Throughout, the poet displays a fidelity to poetic craft and innovative technique that few second books ever achieve. While you will be lured into this book by its ‘blood-song for / the marrowed ache and awe of tomorrow,’ you will be released, upon reading the final poem, breathless.” Davis’s first collection, Revising the Storm, was published by BOA Editions in 2014.
Safia Elhillo and Hieu Minh Nguyen Win 2018 Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships
Congratulations to the 2018 winners of the Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships! This years winners include Safia Elhillo, co-editor of the forthcoming Breakbeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me (Haymarket Books, April 2019), and Hieu Minh Ngyuen, author of Not Here (Coffee House Press). With an award of $25,800, the fellowship is among the largest and most prestigious awards available for young poets in the United States. The fellows will make their first joint appearance at the Dodge Poetry Festival in October, and the December 2018 issue of Poetry Magazine will feature a sampling of their work. Bravo to Safia and Hieu!
A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause Wins 2018 Krause Essay Prize
Congratulations to Shawn Wen, whose book A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause (Sarabande Books) has won the 2018 Krause Essay Prize! Founded in 2006, the Krause Essay Prize is awarded each year to the work that best exemplifies the art of essaying. As a celebration of inquiry, experimentation, discovery, and change, the Prize seeks to honor work that emphasizes the activity of a text, rather than that text’s status as a dispensary of information. Along with the other nominees A Twenty Minute Silence will become a primary text in a semester-long graduate writing seminar at the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Wen will receive an award of $10,000. Bravo, Shawn!
Beautiful Music is 2018 Great Lakes Great Reads Adult Fiction Winner
We’re thrilled to share the news that Michael Zadoorian’s Beautiful Music (Akashic Books) has been named the Adult Fiction Winner for the 2018 Great Lakes Great Reads! The award, presented by the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, recognizes “excellence in writing for books about or written by authors with ties to the Great Lakes region.” Congratulations, Michael!