Friday, May 27, 2011

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.

Monday, May 23, 2011

New Books: Journal of American Foreign Policy by Jeff Hoffman

Journal of American Foreign Policy

$15.00 paper
ISBN: 978-1-930974-97-5
Available Now!
Buy: Amazon.com | spdbooks.org


Winner of the 2010 New Issues Poetry Prize
Selected by Linda Gregerson


"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

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.

More links:

www.wmich.edu/newissues/titles/hoffman-journal.html
"Handshake Histories" on Poem Flow from Poets.org

New Books: Northerners by Seth Abramson

Northerners

$15.00 paper
ISBN: 978-1-930974-96-8
Available Now!
Buy: Amazon.com | spdbooks.org


Winner of the 2010 Green Rose Prize

Seth Abramson is the author of The Suburban Ecstasies (Ghost Road Press, 2009), and a contributing author to The Creative Writing MFA Handbook (Continuum, 2008). He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and is currently a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
"... serious and ambitious, full of torqued proverbs and hard-to-follow advice, Abramson's own work shows a poet uncommonly interested in general statements, in hard questions, and harder answers, about how to live ..." - Publisher's Weekly
"To reckon the currents of muscular energy in Seth Abramson's Northerners is to recognize that poetry may be located in language’s minute particulars and in the local but it penetrates every thought, every atom of one’s daily life." - Peter Gizzi

Elaine Sexton 2011 Readings

Elaine Sexton, author of Causeway and Sleuth, will be giving the following readings:


May 23, 2011, 1:00
Bach at One
St. Paul's Chapel
Broadway & Fulton Streets
New York, NY

June 26, 2011, 4:30
Elaine Sexton & Eric McHugh
Hudson Valley Writers Center
Sleepy Hollow, NY

September 11th, 7pm
Erika's Salon
Williamsburgh, NY

Oct. 17, 2011
Jennifer Barber, Elaine Sexton & Ron Slate
U. Mass/Boston Bookstore
Boston, MA

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

New Books: Undone by Maxine Scates

Undone
Undone
by Maxine Scates

$15.00 paper
ISBN: 978-1-930974-99-9
Available Now
Amazon.com | spdbooks.org

"By brave and honest recognition, coupled with a deft ability to glide between realms of perception tripped open by memory and emotion, Maxine Scates reconstructs a life undone by the brokenness of family, friends, and self. Nuanced, mysterious, intimate. Beautiful poems."
—Dorianne Laux

Maxine Scates is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Toluca Street and Black Loam. She is coeditor, with David Trinidad, of Holding Our Own: The Selected Poems of Ann Stanford. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

Readings by Maxine Scates:

Maxine Scates will be reading with Dorianne Laux at Tsunami Books (2585 Willamette St., Eugene, OR) on Wednesday, June 29, from 7:00 - 10:00 p.m. For more information call (541) 345-8986.

June 15th, 8 p.m. with Martha Silano at Mountain Writers at the Press Club in Portland, OR
www.mountainwriters.org/events/documents/ScatesSilano.pdf

July 10, workshop from 11-1:30 and reading at 2 p.m. at the Bend Public Library Second Sunday Series in Bend, OR