Awards and Honors for NER Authors

April 23, 2019

Congratulations to all of the NER authors who have recently been honored with awards and fellowships, including Owen McLeod, Penelope Cray, Mark Irwin, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Tiana Clark, Charlie Clark, Geffrey Davis, Jenny Johnson, Sasha Pimentel, and Alison C. Rollins.

Owen McLeod’s poetry collection Dream Kitchen was awarded the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Judge Rosanna Warren said of the collection, “Owen McLeod knows how to pluck what Pound called ‘the natural object’ from everyday life and endow it with symbolic force. He mingles a sensuous feel for vowels and consonants, with a graceful play of speech rhythms and a gift for revelatory strangeness. I’ve copied out his lines in my notebook for the sheer pleasure of it.” The prize includes $1,000 and publication by The University of North Texas Press.
McLeod is a studio potter and a professor of philosophy at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania, where he lives; his poem “Uroboros,” was featured in NER 36.4.

Congratulations to Penelope Cray, whose short story collection Miracles Come on Mondays was selected as the winner of the Robert C. Jones Prize for Short Prose. Judge Kazim Ali said of the collection, “These dark fractured fables tell stories of strange texture; stories about characters trying to find their way amid currents both small and large in a world in which personal and spiritual intimacy feel dangerously compromised. They are philosophical, funny, and frank. Like the fictions of Fanny Howe, Italo Calvino, and Rikki Ducornet, these stories rarely comfort. Then again, as one narrator observes, ‘When some alien sensation rises in the body, it unsettles rather than clarifies.’”
Cray holds an MFA from the New School and lives with her husband and two children in Shelburne, Vermont, where she operates an editorial business from home. Three of her pieces were featured in NER 36.4; read her story “Real and True” here, and listen to an oral performance of her story “The Red Painter,” delivered at NER Out Loud, here.

Frequent NER contributor and poet Mark Irwin was awarded the 2018 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry—an annual book contest sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at California State University, Fresno—for his collection Shimmer. The prize, named after the late poet Philip Levine who taught at Fresno State for many years and served as United States poet laureate from 2011-2012, includes a $2,000 prize and publication by Anhinga Press.
Irwin teaches graduate and undergraduate poetry workshops in the Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California, and he lives in Los Angeles and Colorado. Irwin has been a frequent contributor at NER since 1991; read his poem, “Three Panels,” featured in NER 22.1, here and check back in our 2019 summer issue for new poems from Shimmer.

A number of NER authors have been awarded Creative Writing Fellowships in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts. The NEA Literature Fellowships program operates on a two-year cycle, alternating between prose and poetry fellowships, which offer $25,000 grants to published creative writers that enable the recipients to set aside time for writing, research, travel, and general career advancement. The 2019 NEA Creative Writing (Poetry) Fellowship recipients include:

Reginald Dwayne Betts (31.4, 34.1, 35.3)
Charlie Clark (38.4)
Tiana Clark (39.2)
Geffrey Davis (39.2)
Jenny Johnson (34.3-4)
Sasha Pimentel (36.4)
Alison C. Rollins (39.3)

Congratulations to all of the 2019 NEA Fellows!

New Books from NER Authors

May 8, 2017

Irwin is a writer undaunted by the lyric’s insufficiency. He makes from our confusion and bewilderment a poetry of propulsive language, imaginative depth, and a wounded moral authority that recalls the work of Milosz, Herbert, and Szymborska. In other words, Mark Irwin fashions poems that matter.—David Wojahn

We are pleased to announce the publication of Mark Irwin’s A Passion According to Green. Irwin’s work has appeared in a number of NER issues over the years, including 22.1. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, among them American Urn: Selected Poems (2015) and Large White House Speaking (2013). He has translated Philippe Denis’s Notebook of Shadows and Nichita Stanescu’s Ask the Circle to Forgive You: Selected Poems. His poetry and essays have appeared in literary magazines including American Poetry Review, Agni, the Atlantic Monthly, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, and the Nation. His collection of essays, Monster: Distortion, Abstraction, and Originality in Contemporary American Poetry, will appear in 2017.

Recognition for Irwin’s work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, four Pushcart Prizes, two Colorado Book Awards, the James Wright Poetry Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fulbright, Lilly, and Wurlitzer Foundations. He is an associate professor in the PhD in Creative Writing & Literature Program at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles and Colorado.

Purchase A Passion According to Green from New Issues Press.

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Every page of Our Lady of Not Asking Why is lit by an electric human voice. . . . [Kampa] possesses the lyric gifts to say what is hard and make us feel the truth of it. This is beautiful, sensual work, rich with precision and poise. —Mary Szybist

Congratulations to Courtney Kampa on the publication of her new collection, Our Lady of Not Asking Why. Kampa’s poem “Cardiac” appeared in NER 33.4 (2013). Her writing has been published in Boston Review, TriQuarterly, the Journal, the National Poetry Review, and elsewhere, and she has received awards from Best New Poets, the Atlantic, Poets & Writers magazine, and North American Review. In 2014, she won the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers’ Choice Award, as well as Columbia University’s David Craig Austin Memorial Award for Most Outstanding Thesis. She was raised in Virginia.

Purchase Our Lady of Not Asking Why from OxBow Press

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This extraordinary and sobering debut begins with a literal stutter—”Since I couldn’t say tomorrow / I said Wednesday.” In trade for this impediment, Adam Giannelli finds that, in poetry, what can’t be said gives way to what must be said.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

We are pleased to announce the publication of Adam Giannelli’s Tremulous Hinge. Giannelli published two poems in NER 32. 4 (2012), as well as poems in the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

From the Publisher: Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia—in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. . . . From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.

Purchase Tremulous Hinge from University of Iowa Press.

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Teicher’s poems are largely confessional and autobiographical, and The Trembling Answers is no exception; this particular volume deals with explorations of family and fatherhood, and the role his poetry plays across each. One of Teicher’s great strengths is his honesty. He frequently reveals his flaws and mistakes to the reader, laying bare intimate details about his wife, his son, and his marriage to illustrate his humanity. —Literary Hub

From the publisher: At once an extension of and a departure from his previous explorations of family and art, Craig Morgan Teicher’s The Trembling Answers delves boldly into the tangled realms of . . . day-to-day—including the alert anxiety and remarkable beauty of caring for a child with severe cerebral palsy—these personal narratives brightly illuminate the relationship that exists between poetry and a life fiercely lived.

Teicher, whose poetry appeared in NER 34.3-4, is the editor of Once and for All: The Best of Delmore Schwartz. His first book of essays about poetry, We Begin in Gladness: On Poetic Development, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2018. He works at Publishers Weekly as Director of Digital Operations, previously serving as PW’s poetry reviews editor. He remains a prolific critic and reviewer of poetry, contributing regularly to the New York Times Book Review, the LA Times, NPR, and other publications. He has served on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, and has taught at NYU, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Princeton, and elsewhere. He lives in New Jersey with his wife, the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, and their children.

Purchase The Trembling Answers from BOA Editions

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[Richard Tillinghast] brings to his sojourns a brilliant eye, a friendly soul, and eclectic knowledge of a variety of disparate areas—Civil War history, Venetian architectures, Eastern cultures, Irish music, and the ways of out-of-the-way people.—Philip Brady, author of By Heart: Reflections of a Rust Belt Bard

From the Publisher: Renowned poet Richard Tillinghast’s wanderlust and restless spirit are nearly as well known as his verses. This book of essays captures that penchant to wander, yet Journeys into the Mind of the World is not merely a compilation of travel stories—it is a book of places. It explores Ireland, England, India, the Middle East, Tennessee, and Hawaii in a deeper way than would be typical of travel literature, attempting to enter not just the world, but “the mind of the world”—the roots and history of places, their political and cultural history, spiritual, artistic, architectural, and ethnic dimensions. . . . Readers will feel a sense of being everywhere at once, in a strange simultaneity, a time and place beyond any map or
guidebook.

Tillinghast has published his work in NER numerous times over the years, most recently in NER 35.3. He is the author of three recent books of poetry: Sewanee Poems (Evergreen, 2009; second edition, 2012), Selected Poems (Dedalus, Dublin, 2009), and Wayfaring Stranger (Word Palace, 2012). Among his nonfiction books are Finding Ireland (University of Notre Dame, 2008) and An Armchair Traveller’s History of Istanbul (Haus Publishing, London, 2012).

Purchase Journeys into the Mind of the World from the University of Tennessee Press or your independent bookseller.