Rochester, N.Y. — BOA Editions is pleased to share that Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey by Craig Morgan Teicher is the winner of the 2022 Paterson Poetry Prize.
The Paterson Poetry Prize is sponsored by The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. It is a $1,000 award for a book of poems, 48 pages or more in length, selected by our judges as the strongest collection of poems published in 2021. Teicher will be give a poetry reading and workshop at Poetry Center on April 1, 2023. To learn more about the Prize and see the list of finalists, please visit the Paterson Poetry Prize’s website.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Founder & Executive Director of The Poetry Center said of the collection, “In this book, Teicher explores the joys and sorrows of domestic life, giving us a complete picture of growing into middleage in the suburbs and of moving into maturity. This is a brilliant book that leaves us wiser than when we began reading.”
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books of poems: Welcome to Sonnetville, New Jersey (BOA, 2021); The Trembling Answers (BOA, 2017), which won the 2015 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; To Keep Love Blurry (BOA, 2012); and Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (CLP, 2007), winner of the 2007 Colorado Prize for Poetry. He also wrote Cradle Book: Stories and Fables (BOA, 2010) and the chapbook Ambivalence and Other Conundrums (Omnidawn, 2014). His first collection of essays, We Begin in Gladness, was published by Graywolf in November, 2018. Teicher edited Once and For All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz (New Directions, 2016) and serves as a poetry editor for The Literary Review. He writes about books for many publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Times, and NPR. He worked for many years at Publishers Weekly and is now Digital Director of The Paris Review. He is a 2021 recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and children.
The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, founded in 1980 by award-winning poet, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, its executive director, has hosted thousands of poets over the years at its readings, workshops and conferences. Readings at the Center have included Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Kunitz, Ruth Stone, Marge Piercy, Billy Collins, Richard Blanco, Patricia Smith and many others. The Poetry Center is housed in the historic Hamilton Club Building on the campus of Passaic County Community College in Paterson, New Jersey. The Poetry Center has been awarded several Citations of Excellence and is funded in part by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Learn more about BOA Editions, Ltd. here and buy a copy of the winning collection here.
