Winner of the 2010 New Issues Poetry Prize

Jeff Hoffman has won the 2010 New Issues Poetry Prize for his manuscript Journal of American Foreign Policy. Linda Gregerson, author of Magnetic North, judged.

Jeff wins a $2,000 award and publication of his manuscript in the spring of 2011.

Jeff Hoffman grew up in western Pennsylvania and was educated at the University of New Hampshire, the University of Texas (where he was a Michener Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers), and at Stanford University (where he was a Stegner Fellow in poetry). He has also been a Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellow with Paramount Pictures. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Spinning Jenny, and elsewhere. His short plays have been performed throughout the United States and can be found in anthologies that are available from Vintage and Samuel French. He currently lives in Pasadena, CA.

"The way memory and grief and love compose the stories that enable us to go on living. The toxic mix of innocence and inadvertence, wishfulness and making-do that comes to look like purpose. Which on the scale of nations we call 'policy.' These brilliant poems have leverage on it all: micro- and macro- and the sorry, human mess we too often make of both. They also have so masterful a way with idiom and timing that even the sternest insight is leavened with a measure of joy. Tonic intelligence, exhilarating craftsmanship: Jeff Hoffman’s fine first book is a gift to us all." 

—Linda Gregerson, from the Judge’s Citation

Lizzie Hutton’s manuscript She’d Waited Millennia was named runner-up by the judge and will be published in the fall of 2011.

Lizzie Hutton received her AB from Princeton University and her MFA from the University of Michigan. Her poetry has appeared in the Harvard Review, Yale Review, Antioch Review and Interim, among other journals, and her essays in the New England Review; in 2009 she was awarded the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize for a single poem. She currently lives in Ann Arbor and teaches at the University of Michigan's Sweetland Writing Center.

The New Issues Poetry Prize is selected by a guest judge. Manuscripts are read blind. Thank you to Linda Gregerson for judging our 2010 prize. The 2011 prize will be judged by David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace. Guidelines for the 2011 prize are available on our website.