Deborah Brown is the 2010 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner for her first collection of poems, Walking the Dog’s Shadow. Tony Hoagland selected this manuscript from 18 finalists and will write a Foreword to the published collection. Brown will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in March, 2011, in the A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America Series.
An annual competition, the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize is open to poets who have yet to publish a full-length-book collection of poetry. This year’s runner-ups were Red Appetites by Laura Bastian; Soldier’s Apology by Kerry James Evans; and Pathology of Goodness by Karen Zaborowski Duffy. Deborah Brown’s winning manuscript was chosen from a field of 780 entries. Tony Hoagland says, “Deborah Brown’s poems remind me a little of the great Polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska. They both make thinking look easy. Overwhelmed and ashamed of the world, unqualified to fix anything, Brown’s speaker remains calmly capable of thought. ‘I’m writing to you from inside,/ in the thick of it’ she says. And also, ‘Bowling alone is no solution.’ And ‘In college I was sure I had a soul…What was I thinking?’ In Brown’s poems, our glasses (which we need, because the eyes aren’t what they used to be) have somehow been misplaced. First she locates them. With them, she finds a thread, which she follows down the winding corridors and stairways, to the deep part of the poem, where it touches life. Brown’s poems aren’t just about a eureka moment; they taste of the whole journey. Walking the Dog’s Shadow is a beautiful book, wise and sure of itself, fresh with wit and gravity, serious and true.”
Deborah Brown says, “A. Poulin Jr.’s Contemporary American Poetry is a book I carried with me for years. It introduced me to the new American poets. To win the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and to be published by BOA Editions is an honor.”
BOA Editions will accept manuscripts for the tenth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize between August 1, 2010 and November 30, 2010. An entry form and fee are required. The guidelines for the 2011 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize will be announced on www.boaeditions.org later this year.
Deborah Brown is a Professor of English at University of New Hampshire at Manchester. With Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, she co-edited Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (University of Arkansas Press, 2005), an anthology of poets’ writings on technical and aesthetic issues in poetry. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as Prairie Schooner, the Alaska Quarterly Review, Margie, Rattle and The Women’s Review of Books. Her chapbook of poems, News from the Grate, appeared in 2003. With Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas she co-translated Giovanni Pascoli Last Voyage: Selected Poems which will be published by Red Hen Press in 2010. Deborah Brown graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A. in English, received an M.F.A. in Poetry from Warren Wilson College and a Ph.D. in English and American literature from UNH. She lives with her husband and three cats on a former dairy farm in the woods of Warner, NH.
Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His collections of poetry include What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Donkey Gospel (1998), which received the James Laughlin Award; and Sweet Ruin (1992), chosen by Donald Justice for the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and winner of the Zacharis Award from Emerson College. Hoagland’s other honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the O.B. Hardison Prize for Poetry and Teaching from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Poetry Foundation’s 2005 Mark Twain Award. He currently teaches at the University of Houston and Warren Wilson College.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is one of the premier independent publishers of contemporary poetry and literary fiction. Founded in 1976 by A. Poulin, Jr. to provide a venue for both new and established poets to be published, BOA has released more than 220 titles, including two dozen books of poetry in translation. Many BOA titles and authors have been recognized with literary awards, including the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
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