Winner of the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize

Andrew Allport has won the 2011 New Issues Poetry Prize for his manuscript the body | of space | in the shape of the human. David Wojahn, author of World Tree, judged.

Andrew wins a $2,000 award and publication of his manuscript in the spring of 2012.

Andrew Allport holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where he completed a dissertation examining the poetics and politics of the fragment form in nineteenth-century British poetry. His reviews, poems, and essays appear or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. He is the author of a chapbook, The Ice Ship & Other Vessels, available from Proem Press. He lives in Los Angeles with his family and ghosts.

"Andrew Allport’s debut collection is at once intensely personal and urgently civic. It is brilliantly studied in its lyricality and yet, somehow, almost feral in its sustained ferocity. The tonal confidence, elegiac feeling, and belief in the sustaining (if not the transcendent) properties of the lyric make this collection reminiscent of some of the essential first books of the late century—I’m reminded of Dugan’s Poems, Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist, and Lowell’s Lord Weary’s Castle. This is august company indeed." —David Wojahn, from the Judge’s Citation

Shara Lessley’s Two-Headed Nightingale and CJ Evans’s A Penance will also be published in 2012.

Shara Lessley is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. She other awards include the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and Olive B. O'Connor Fellowship from Colgate University. She currently lives in Amman, Jordan. 

CJ Evans is the author of the chapbook The Category of Outcast, selected by Terrance Hayes for the Poetry Society of America's chapbook series. He is the managing editor at Two Lines: World Writing in Translation.

The New Issues Poetry Prize is selected by a guest judge. Thank you to David Wojahn for judging our 2011 contest. The 2012 prize will be selected by Jean Valentine, author of Break the Glass. Guidelines for the 2012 prize are available on our website.