We are thrilled to announce that Marsha de la O is the winner of BOA Editions’ Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, Antidote for Night!
Antidote for Night will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2015, within the American Poets Continuum Series. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for this award.
Poet, actress, and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry, and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. She championed the work of young and gifted poets, helping many of them find publication. This award carries an honorarium of $1,000 and is sponsored by the Gardner Charitable Trust. Poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Michael Blumenthal (both former recipients of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) assisted in judging the award, and the final selection was made by BOA Publisher Peter Conners.
The most recent winners of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award are Jillian Weise, for The Book of Goodbyes, and Aracelis Girmay, for Kingdom Animalia.
Marsha de la O’s Black Hope won the New Issues Poetry Prize from the University of Western Michigan and an Editor’s Choice Award. Her work appears widely in such journals as Barrow Street, Passages North, Solo, and Third Coast, and has been anthologized in Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (Ballantine), Saying What Needs to Be Said (Solo Press); Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California (Greenhouse Review Press); the poetry workshop handbook One for the Money: The Sentence as Poetic Form (Lynx House Press), and the forthcoming Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series). A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the recipient of the 2014 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, the dA Poetry Prize, the Ventura Poetry Prize, two cultural arts grants from the City of Ventura, and a Tumblewords Poetry Residency. With her husband, poet Phil Taggart, she publishes the poetry journal Askew.
Congratulations, Marsha, and welcome to the BOA family!
