Ryan Teitman is the 2011 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner for his first collection of poems, Litany for the City. Jane Hirshfield selected this manuscript from 16 finalists and will write a Foreword to the published collection. Teitman will receive a $1,500 honorarium and book publication by BOA Editions, Ltd. in March, 2012, 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 Slow Weather Hymnal by David Welch; The Innermost Animal by Desiree Alvarez; and Instructions for my Mother’s Funeral by Laura Read. Ryan Teitman’s winning manuscript was chosen from a field of over 660 entries. Final judge Jane Hirshfield said that among a very strong group of finalists, this book stood out for its strongly individual voice, originality of vision, and the strength of phrasing and feeling in its pages: “I found in this manuscript a poet doing the work of real exploration, thinking and feeling his way through images of cities both real and metaphoric, inner and outer. This book carries both startling imaginative freedoms and the impulsion of a person navigating the terrain of his life by means of the star-chart and sextant of poems–a winning combination, for me.”
BOA Editions will accept manuscripts for the 11th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize between August 1, 2011 and November 30, 2011. An entry form and fee are required. The guidelines for the 2012 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize will be announced on www.boaeditions.org later this year.
Ryan Teitman is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in English from Indiana University, and his poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Pleiades, Redivider, Sycamore Review, Washington Square, and other journals. His work has won the Fineline Competition from Mid-American Review and an AWP Intro Journals Award, along with receiving several Pushcart Prize nominations. He currently lives in Berkeley, California.
Jane Hirshfield was born in New York City in 1953. After receiving her B.A. from Princeton University in their first graduating class to include women, she went on to study at the San Francisco Zen Center. Her books of poetry include After (HarperCollins, 2006); Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Lives of the Heart (1997), The October Palace (1994), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), and Alaya (1982). Her honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. In 2004, Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets.
