Barnard Women Poets Prize

Last updated

The Barnard Women Poets Prize is a literary award in the United States for an English language book of poetry. From 1986 to 2001, the prize was a first-book award called the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. Winners had their poetry book published under the auspices of the award, and 16 were published from 1986 to 2001 with support from the Axe-Houghton Foundation and alumnae of Barnard College. Beacon Press was the publisher. [1]

Contents

A 2000 essay in the Chicago Review named this prize as one of two examples (along with the Yale Series of Younger Poets) of "first-book awards of notable integrity". [2]

In 2003, Women Poets at Barnard, in collaboration with W.W. Norton, inaugurated a new biennial book prize for the best second book by an American woman poet, expressing the view that "a second book more firmly establishes a poet". [3] It is awarded by Women Poets at Barnard and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company and includes publication of the poetry book and a free public poetry reading by the author at Barnard. [4]

Winners and judges

YearWinnerBookJudge
2016 Brittany Perham Double Portrait Claudia Rankine
2013 Sandra Lim The Wilderness Louise Glück [4]
2011 Traci Brimhall Our Lady of the Ruins Carolyn Forché
2009 Sandra Beasley I Was the Jukebox Joy Harjo
2007 Lisa Williams Woman Reading to the Sea Joyce Carol Oates
2006 Cathy Park Hong Dance Dance Revolution Adrienne Rich
2005 Julie Sheehan Orient Point Billy Collins
2004 Tessa Rumsey The Return Message
2003 Rebecca Wolff Figment
2001 Lise Goett Waiting for the Paraclete [5]
2000 Sharan Strange Ash Sonia Sanchez
1999 Christine Hume Musica Domestica Heather McHugh
1998 Jenna Osman The Character Lyn Hejinian
1997 Larissa Szporluk Dark Sky Question Brenda Hillman
1996 Harriet Levin The Christmas Show [6] Eavan Boland
1995 Reetika Vazirani White Elephants Marilyn Hacker
1994 Joyce Sutphen Straight Out of View
1993 Donna Masini That Kind of DangerMona Van Duyn
1992 Ruth Foreman We Are the Young Magicians Cherrie Maraga
1991 Frances McCue The Stenographer's Breakfast Colleen J. McElroy
1990 Dorothy Barresi All of the Above Olga Broumas
1989 Barbara Jordan Channel Molly Peacock
1988 Mary B. Campbell The World, The Flesh, and angels Carolyn Forché
1987 Elizabeth Socolow Laughing at Gravity: Conversations with Isaac Newton Marie Ponsot
1986 Patricia Storace Heredity Louise Bernikow

Related Research Articles

Adrienne Rich American poet, essayist and feminist

Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum"; which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity which has impacted and even filled women's lives.

Susan Howe American writer

Susan Howe is an American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre. Many of Howe's books are layered with historical, mythical, and other references, often presented in an unorthodox format. Her work contains lyrical echoes of sound, and yet is not pinned down by a consistent metrical pattern or a conventional poetic rhyme scheme.

Eavan Boland Irish poet, author, and professor

Eavan Boland is an Irish poet, author, and professor. She is currently a professor at Stanford University, where she has taught since 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

Rita Dove American poet and author

Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006.

W. S. Merwin American poet

William Stanley Merwin was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

Martín Espada Puerto Rican poet

Martín Espada is a Latino poet, and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.

Maxine Kumin American poet and author

Maxine Kumin was an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981–1982.

Peter Balakian American writer

Peter Balakian is an Armenian American poet, writer and academic, the Donald M. and Constance H. Rebar Professor of Humanities at Colgate University. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2016.

Molly Peacock American-Canadian writer

Molly Peacock is an American-Canadian poet, essayist, biographer and speaker, whose multi-genre literary life also includes memoir, short fiction, and a one-woman show.

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.

Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.

Linda Pastan is an American poet of Jewish background. From 1991–1995 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. She is known for writing short poems that address topics like family life, domesticity, motherhood, the female experience, aging, death, loss and the fear of loss, as well as the fragility of life and relationships. Her most recent collections of poetry include Insomnia, Traveling Light, and A Dog Runs Through It.

B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is The Blue Buick, and his poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review. His third poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe, winner of the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award, brought Fairchild's work to national prominence, garnering him a large number of awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, California Book Award, Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, National Book Award (finalist), Capricorn Poetry Award, and Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships. The book ultimately gave him international prominence, as The Way Weiser Press in England published the U.K. edition of the book. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched...workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music."

Rebecca Wolff is a poet, fiction writer, and the editor and creator of both Fence Magazine and Fence Books. She is a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute.

Michael Collier (poet) American writer and academic

Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripedes' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.

Cathy Park Hong American writer

Cathy Park Hong is a Korean-American poet, writer, and professor who has published three volumes of poetry. Much of her work includes mixed language and serialized narrative.

A. Van Jordan is an American poet. He is Collegiate Professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan and distinguished visiting professor at Ithaca College. He previously served as the first Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at the Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of four collections: Rise (2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), Quantum Lyrics (2007), and The Cineaste (2013). Jordan's awards include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Arthur Vogelsang is an American poet, teacher and editor.

Beth Ann Fennelly American writer

Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.

References