The Foundation Celebrates 61 Years of
National Book Awards Poetry
The
NBF poetry blog is now live. >
- Winners Make Up a Pantheon of Post-War American Poetry,
Including William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens,
W.H. Auden,
Elizabeth Bishop, Lucille Clifton, Adrienne Rich, and
John Ashbery
- Retrospective to Include Daily Blog, Individual Author Web Pages, Panel Discussions, and Readings
- Public Programs to Take Place in New York, Minneapolis, and Portland (Oregon)
- Poets Elizabeth Alexander, Stephen Burt, Tony Hoagland, James Longenbach, Maureen McLane, Katie Peterson, and Susan Stewart to Participate in New York Programs
- Thirteen Emerging Poets to Write Blog Essays on NBA Winners
From February through April of 2011, the Foundation will host a retrospective examining more than sixty years of American poetry. The retrospective will include a daily blog featuring essays by emerging poets on all past Winners of the National Book Award for Poetry, as well as a series of public programs in three U.S. cities.
Each day for ten weeks, beginning on February 14, 2011, the Foundation will publish a brief, original blog essay on a National Book Award Winner, beginning with William Carlos Williams, Winner of the first National Book Award for Poetry in 1950. In addition to the essay, each blog page will include a brief biography of the poet and related information and links.
- Dilruba Ahmed
- Megan Snyder-Camp
- Scott Challener
- Ross Gay
- John Murillo
- Katie Peterson
- Kiki Petrosino
- Patrick Rosal
- Evie Shockley
- Lee Felice Pinkas, editor of Cellpoems
- Saara Myrene Raappana, editor of Cellpoems
- Christopher Shannon, editor of Cellpoems
- Eric Smith, editor of Cellpoems
In addition, the Foundation will co-sponsor public discussions and readings to focus on the entire list of National Book Award Poetry Winners in three locations across the country: The New School and the Center for Book Arts in New York, The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, and Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon, featuring some of America’s foremost poets and poetry scholars.
On February 24, 2011, in New York,
Elizabeth
Alexander, Stephen
Burt, Tony
Hoagland, James
Longenbach, Maureen
McLane, and Susan
Stewart will kick off events with a panel discussion
entitled “Lineage: American Poetry Since
1950,” moderated by Katie
Peterson, using the National Book Award as a point
of departure to assess post-War poetry trends and achievements.
The following evening, Burt, Hoagland, Longenbach, McLane,
Peterson, and Stewart will read from their own work
at the Center for Book Arts.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the project will result in a digitized literary archive—with curatorial appreciations of the 57 books by contemporary poets, digitized images of the original covers, portrait photographs of the authors, and related information and links—that will take up permanent residence on the Foundation’s website.
Additional funding has been provided by the New York Council for the Humanities.
According to the Foundation’s Director of Programs, Leslie Shipman, who developed the program along with Executive Director Harold Augenbraum and Program Manager Rebecca Keith, “This look back at our list of Poetry Winners allows us to examine the ways in which American poetry has evolved over the past sixty years, more than a century beyond the wellsprings of Dickinson and Whitman, into the multiplicity of passions it represents today. For some it is merely a list of poets whom we now consider canonical; for others it is a document of exclusion along aesthetic, gender, and racial lines. The Foundation hopes to spark a spirited discussion of where American poetry has been, where it is now, and where it might be headed as we enter a new age of possibility for this most ancient form of expression.”
Lineage: American Poetry Since 1950 Panel Bios
Elizabeth
Alexander’s most recent book is Crave
Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. She
is the author of five previous books of poetry, including
American Sublime, which was a finalist for
the Pulitzer Prize, and two books of essays, including
The Black Interior. Her awards and honors include
the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement in Poetry award,
the Jackson Poetry Prize of Poets & Writers, Inc.,
and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. Alexander
is the chair of the African American Studies Department
at Yale University.
Photo credit: CJ Gunther
Stephen
Burt is Professor of English at Harvard. His
books include The Art of the Sonnet, with David
Mikics (Harvard UP, 2010); Close Calls with Nonsense:
Reading New Poetry (Graywolf, 2009); The Forms
of Youth (Columbia UP, 2007); and Parallel
Play, a collection of poems (Graywolf, 2006). His
reviews and essays—most of them about poets and
poetry, and a few of them about pop music, politics
or women's basketball—appear almost regularly
in Boston Review, the London Review of
Books, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, PN
Review, and several other journals on both sides
of the Atlantic.
Photo credit: Jessica Burt
Tony
Hoagland’s collections of poetry include
Unincorporated Persons of the Late Honda Dynasty;
What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the
National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel,
which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet
Ruin, chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham
Prize in Poetry. He has also published two chapbooks,
Hard Rain and Little Oceans, and Real Sofistikashun,
a collection of craft essays about poetry. Hoagland's
other honors include grants from the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B.
Hardisson Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger
Shakespeare Library, and the Poetry Foundation's 2005
Mark Twain Award in recognition of his contribution
to humor in American poetry. He currently teaches at
the University of Houston and in the Warren Wilson College
MFA program.
Photo credit: Kathleen Lee
James
Longenbach is the author of four collections
of poems, most recently The Iron Key, published
by W.W. Norton, as well as five books of literary criticism,
most recently The Art of the Poetic Line, published
by Graywolf. His poems and his reviews of contemporary
poets have appeared in many magazines, including
The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York
Times Book Review. He teaches in the Warren Wilson
MFA Program for Writers and at the University of Rochester,
where he is the Joseph H. Gilmore Professor of English.
Photo credit: Adam Fenster
Maureen
N. McLane is the author of two books of poems,
World Enough (2010) and Same Life
(2008), as well as a poetry chapbook, This Carrying
Life (2005). She has also published two books of
literary criticism: Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and
the Making of British Romantic Poetry (2008) and
Romanticism and the Human Sciences (2006);
she co-edited The Cambridge Companion to British
Romantic Poetry (2008). A contributing editor at
Boston Review, she was for years the chief
poetry critic of the Chicago Tribune; her articles
on poetry, contemporary fiction, and sexuality have
appeared widely, in (e.g.) The New York Times, The
Chicago Tribune, Boston Review, The Washington Post,
American Poet, and on the Poetry Foundation website.
In 2003 she won the National Book Critics Circle’s
Nona Balakian Award for Excellence in Book Reviewing.
She has taught at NYU since 2008.
Photo credit: Joanna Eldredge
Morrissey
A
poet, critic, and translator, Susan Stewart
is the author of five books of poetry, including
Red Rover, Columbarium, which won the 2003
National Book Critics Circle award, and The Forest.
Her most recent books of criticism are the forthcoming
The Poet's Freedom: A Notebook on Making; Poetry and
the Fate of the Senses, and The Open Studio:
Essays on Art and Aesthetics, a collection of her
writings on contemporary art. Her song cycle, "Songs
for Adam," commissioned by the Chicago Symphony,
with music by the composer James Primosch, had its world
premiere with baritone Brian Mulligan and the CSO, Sir
Andrew Davis conducting, last October, and in 2009 she
also received an Academy Award in Literature from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters. A former MacArthur
Fellow and current Chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets, she is the Avalon Foundation Professor of the
Humanities at Princeton University.
Photo courtesy of University
of Chicago Press
Moderator:
Katie Peterson is the author of a book of poems,
This One Tree (New Issues, 2006). She has received
fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Foundation
for Contemporary Arts. Her reviews have appeared in
the Boston Review and the Chicago Tribune.
She teaches literature at Bennington College.
Photo credit: Ariana Ervin
Sixty-One Years of National Book Awards Poetry Blogger Bios
Dilruba Ahmed’s debut book of poems,
Dhaka Dust (Graywolf, 2011), won the 2010 Bakeless
Prize for poetry. Ahmed’s writing has appeared
in Blackbird, Cream City Review, New England Review,
and The Normal School. She holds an MFA from
Warren Wilson College and lives near Philadelphia. For
more information, visit her website at www.dilrubaahmed.com.
Photo credit: Mike Drzal
Megan
Snyder-Camp's first book of poems, The
Forest of Sure Things, is a deconstructed domestic
narrative set in a small, historically preserved village
on the Pacific Northwest coast. Her poems have appeared
in Field, the Antioch Review, Smartish
Pace, Hayden's Ferry Review, and elsewhere. She
recently received an Individual Artist grant from Washington's
4Culture Foundation to support her current work.
Photo credit: Laura M. Hoffmann
Scott
Challener teaches writing in Boston University’s
Writing Program and Metropolitan College and Northeastern
University’s College of Professional Studies,
and he volunteers for PEN New England’s Prison
Writing Program and 826 Boston. He holds an MFA in Poetry
from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
His work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Narrative Magazine,
The Rumpus, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere.
Photo credit: Thomas Gearty
Ross
Gay’s books of poems include Against
Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and Bringing
the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press,
forthcoming January 2011). His poems have appeared in
American Poetry Review, MARGIE, Ploughshares,
and many other magazines. He has also, with the artist
Kimberly Thomas, collaborated on several artists’
books, including The Cold Loop, BRN2HNT, and
The Bullet. He is an editor with the chapbook
press Q Avenue. Gay received his MFA in poetry from
Sarah Lawrence College, and his PhD in American Literature
from Temple University. He teaches in the low-residency
MFA program in poetry at Drew University, and in Indiana
University’s English department.
Photo credit: Zach Hetrick
John
Murillo is the author of the poetry collection,
Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010). A graduate
of New York University's MFA program in creative writing,
he has received fellowships from the New York Times,
Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown,
and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, among
others. He is a founding member of the collective, The
Symphony, and is currently visiting assistant professor
of creative writing at Cornell University.
Photo credit: Rachel
Eliza Griffiths
Katie Peterson is the author of a book of poems,
This One Tree (New Issues, 2006). She has received
fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced
Study, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Foundation
for Contemporary Arts. Her reviews have appeared in
the Boston Review and the Chicago Tribune.
She teaches literature at Bennington College.
Photo credit: Ariana Ervin
Kiki Petrosino is the author of Fort Red
Border (Sarabande, 2009). She holds graduate degrees
from the University of Chicago and the Iowa Writers'
Workshop. Her poems have appeared in FENCE,
Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, and elsewhere.
She lives and teaches in Louisville.
Photo credit: Philip Miller
Saara Myrene Raappana has new poems in 32
Poems, Cave Wall, The Cincinnati Review, Harvard Review
Online, and Southern Poetry Review and
has been featured on Verse Daily. She is a
managing editor for Cellpoems.
Patrick
Rosal is the author of two full-length poetry
collections, Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive
(Persea, 2003), which won the Members' Choice Award
from the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and most
recently My American Kundiman (Persea, 2006),
which won the Association of Asian American Studies
2006 Book Award in Poetry and the 2007 Global Filipino
Literary Award. Awarded a Fulbright grant as a Senior
U.S. Scholar to the Philippines in 2009, he has had
poems and essays published widely in journals and anthologies,
including Harvard Review, Tin House, American Poetry
Review, The Literary Review, the Beacon Best,
and Language for a New Century.
Photo credit: Stephen Sullivan
Lee Felice Pinkas' poetry and translations have been
published in the Crab Orchard Review, Diagram, Witness,
and Denver Quarterly, among other places. She
is a teacher of English and government at a private
girls' high school in New York City.
Christopher Shannon’s poems
have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Denver
Quarterly, Mid-American Review, and 32 Poems.
He has published reviews in the Germanic Review,
and is the editor of Cellpoems.
Evie
Shockley’s collections of poetry include
the new black (Wesleyan University Press, forthcoming
2011), a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press,
2006), and two chapbooks. She is also author of the
forthcoming critical study, Renegade Poetics: Black
Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American
Poetry (Iowa, 2011). Poems have recently appeared
or will soon appear in such journals and anthologies
as Callaloo, A Broken Thing: Contemporary Poets
on the Line, Iron Horse Literary Review, esque, Talisman,
Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, and Black
Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry.
Shockley co-edits jubilat and is an Assistant
Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Photo credit: Stéphane
Robolin
Eric Smith is a managing editor of Cellpoems.
His poems appear or are forthcoming in Green Mountains
Review, Five Points, and Best New Poets 2010.
He teaches at Marshall University.