Rochester, N.Y. — Bruce Weigl has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his new collection, On the Shores of Welcome Home. His book will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2019 within the American Poets Continuum Series.
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 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.
Bruce Weigl is author of over twenty books of poetry, translations, and essays. His most recent poetry collection, The Abundance of Nothing (TriQuarterly, 2012), was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. A winner of numerous literary awards and fellowships, including the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Robert Creeley Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Weigl’s writing has appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Harpers, and elsewhere. He lives in Oberlin, OH.
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.
