Rochester, NY — BOA Editions is excited to announce that Derrick Austin has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his collection Tenderness, which is forthcoming from BOA in fall 2021 within the American Poets Continuum Series.
“I'm grateful to receive the Isabella Gardner Award and be among such fantastic company. I'm awed every time a reader finds some joy, a little something for themselves, in these poems of queer friendship,” said Austin.
The Isabella Gardner Award carries an honorarium of $1,000 and is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. BOA Publisher Peter Conners made the final selection for this award. The most recent winners of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award are Bruce Weigl for On the Shores of Welcome Home, Christian Barter for Bye-Bye Land, Marsha de la O for Antidote for Night, Jillian Weise for The Book of Goodbyes, and Aracelis Girmay for Kingdom Animalia. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for the award.
Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) was a poet, actress, and associate editor of Poetry magazine who published five celebrated collections of poetry. She was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. During her lifetime, she championed the works of young and gifted poets, helping many of them find publication. The Isabella Gardner Award is named in her honor and is sponsored by the Gardner Charitable Trust.
Derrick Austin's previous poetry collection, Trouble the Water (BOA Editions, 2016), was selected by Mary Szybist as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, New England Review, The Nation, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Tin House, Tupelo Quarterly, and Black Nerd Problems. He is currently a 2019-2021 Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.
BOA Editions, Ltd. is a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning not-for-profit publisher based in Rochester, New York. Founded in 1976 by the late poet, editor, and translator A. Poulin, Jr. to provide a venue for both new and established poets to be published, BOA has released more than 300 titles, including more than two dozen books of poetry-in-translation.
