2009 Poets' Prize
 

Ellen Bryant Voigt Wins 2009 Poets' Prize

Ellen Bryant Voigt is the winner of the 2009 Poets' Prize of $3000. The prize is funded by and voted on by a committee of 22 American poets. Because of its complex nominating and voting procedures, the prize is awarded over a year after most other major awards are announced; this year books published in 2007 were eligible.

Voigt won for Messenger: Selected Poems 1976-2006, published by W. W. Norton. In selecting Voigt's book, the prize committee considered over thirty books. The finalists were Marvin Bell for Mars Being Red (Copper Canyon), Kelly Cherry for Hazard and Prospect (LSU Press), and Mark Jarman for Epistles (Sarabande).

Born in Virginia, Voigt was educated at Converse College and the University of Iowa. She has taught at M.I.T and Goddard College, and was the founder of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, where she has taught since 1981. She served as Poet Laureate of Vermont from 1999 to 2003. She is the author of seven collections of poetry and The Flexible Lyric, a collection of critical essays. She currently resides in Cabot, Vermont.

The Poets' Prize was established in 1988 by Frederick Morgan, Robert McDowell, and Louis Simpson. The first winner was Julia Randall, and the most recent was A. E. Stallings. The motto of the Poets' Prize is "We believe that there is no greater honor than to be awarded a prize by a jury of one's peers."

The current chair of the Poets' Prize Committee, R. S. Gwynn, will preside at the award ceremony, which will take place at the Nicholas Roerich Museum at 319 West 107th Street in New York City at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, May 21, 2009. The event is free and open to the public and will include readings of poems by the honoree and finalists with a reception following. Copies of Messenger will be available for purchase at the event.

The link below lists all past winners:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poets'_Prize

Sam,

Thanks for posting this. This is the best prize out there -- consistently top-notch stuff. Voigt is deserving.

David R.

It's good to see Ellen Bryant Voigt getting recognition. It is quite an honor to be identified as "a poet's poet," a term I often hear applied to Spenser. It's not that only poets can understand him, but that, perhaps, poets can best understand how hard it is to do what he does and make it seem effortless.

Susan

For several months now, I have been praising and recommending The Flexible Lyric but another essay collection co-edited by Ellen Bryant Voight and Gregory Orr is Poets Teaching Poets. In it she has an essay on "Image", but not less important is the imprint left on a collection of essays by the poets who chose them. If one is interested in the craft and hasn't yet read this (and TFL) I recommend them.

Here's an announcement of EBV's latest book:

http://www.amazon.com/Art-Syntax-Rhy.../dp/1555975313

aw heck
 

Sam,

Sorry I won't see you and the usual suspects at the Poets' Prize award evening this year, nor hear the readings as I would like to do! I have a ticket to the Wilbur reading, and so does Wendy Sloan.

I wish they hadn't fallen on the same night!