Tag Archives: Poetry Prize

Award News

The Quebec Writers’ Federation Awards are a series of Canadian literary awards, presented annually by the Quebec Writers’ Federation to the best works of literature in English by writers from Quebec. The A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry is one of seven categories in the annual awards.


CONGRATS to GWP poet, Sarah Wolfson!

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The poems in A Common Name for Everything build idiosyncratic worlds around the themes of nature, home, parenting, and naming—worlds that are at once poignant and absurd: a professional namer of lakes explains his standards; the rural gods are given names; a study of sheep results in loneliness. Steeped in sound play and borrowing academic language to create a specimen lens, these poems bask in the local as they seek to name even the commonest earthly things.

Advance Praise for A Common Name for Everything

“In her stunning first book of poems, Sarah Wolfson drives a team of spirited horses into rural landscapes, many of which she interiorizes figuratively in ways that are wonderfully strange. In one keenly intelligent, musical poem after another, Wolfson instills her lyrical narratives about motherhood, environmental crisis, the inherent elegy of words, natural history, and poetry itself with chthonic imagery, risible asides, empirical logic, and academic nomenclature. For her, poetry itself is ‘the common name of everything,’ and from her ‘place’ she serves her reader ‘soup and small/ theories of holiness’ in evocatively specific, sublime ways. By writing from the ground and body up, Wolfson surprises herself first and then her reader with language that soars with verbal music . . . A Common Name for Everything marks the debut of an enormously talented, wise, and timely new voice. ”
—Chard deNiord, Poet Laureate of Vermont

“In A Common Name for Everything Sarah Wolfson demonstrates, again and again, an entirely uncommon talent for precise and defamiliarizing observation. At times declarative and deceptively plain, and at others more fractured and gestural, the poems in this formidable first collection are informed by a lyric sensibility that is authentic, playful, and unflinchingly direct.”
—Phillip Crymble, Poetry Editor at The Fiddlehead; author of Not Even Laughter 

“I can’t remember when I last read a book of poems that provided such varied pleasures . . . But the gorgeous surfaces of Sarah Wolfson’s work—the poet’s intelligence and curiosity and wit—are not ends in themselves, but a way to get at what seems essential in the self and the world. So we learn the poet is skeptical of god ‘though not of souls,’ become acquainted with a daughter’s ‘need to wonder,’ and waken with the poet to marvel at August ‘with its great star events.’ In short, A Common Name for Everything is anything but common. I’m already eager to hear more from this poet, to be swept away again.”
—Clare Rossini, author of Lingo and Winter Morning with Crow

More Praise

“. . . Humane and full of wonder even as it resists all that is inflated by romanticism, A Common Name for Everything’s insistence on Earth’s ordinary orderings doesn’t efface the deep reverence the speaker has for the same. If there’s a divine in Wolfson’s world, it’s this world itself and all that’s passing through it. In her poems’ radical adjustment of scale back to something earthly and earthy, there’s more than enough.” —Letitia Montgomery-Rodgers, review excerpt from Orion

 

About the Author
Sarah Wolfson’s poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Fiddlehead, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, PRISM international, and TriQuarterly—and they have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal, where she teaches at McGill University.

 

Sundog Poetry Center and Green Writers Press Announce New Book Award

Mary Ruefle
PHOTO COURTESY OF HANNAH ENSOR

Good news can be hard to come by these days, but if you’re an emerging poet — or eager to emerge — here’s a welcome opportunity: The Johnson-based Sundog Poetry Center has just announced a brand-new First or Second Book Award for poetry. And there’s a reason for that slightly awkward-sounding name.

“Sometimes a first book is heavily collaborative,” explains Neil Shepard, a veteran poet, the founder of Green Mountains Review and a Sundog board member. “The second is usually post-MFA — really the first book. That’s still relatively an emerging poet.”

In other words, writers who vie for this award might already have an extant book or chapbook, or they might just have a bursting-with-promise manuscript. Either way, the winning entry will be designed, printed and distributed by Sundog collaborator Green Writers Press in Brattleboro.

Tamra Higgins and Mary Jane Dickerson founded Sundog in 2014 with the mission to “promote poetry for the enrichment of our cultural lives,” according to its website. The nonprofit has fulfilled that promise with publications, workshops, retreats, readings and other events. For the most part, Shepard points out, these ventures have featured established poets. For example, when Sundog began collaborating with Green Writers Press, his own book Vermont Exit Ramps II was the first to be published.

But, after Sundog and the press released the 2019 volume Vermont Poets and Their Craft, edited by Shepard and Higgins, “we decided to do something for emerging poets,” Shepard says.

The competition is open only to Vermonters, defined as residents of the state a minimum of six months of the year. The submission deadline is October 31 and must include proof of residency and a $20 application fee. Manuscripts should be 48 to 64 pages long.

Shepard notes that he and other board members — Dickerson, former Vermont poet laureate Chard DeNiord, Rebecca Starks and Bill Drislane — and managing director Sarah Audsley will “each choose two or three manuscripts by the end of November and send them to our final judge, Mary Ruefle.” Vermont’s current poet laureate, Ruefle will make her decision by December 31. The winner will receive $500 and 50 copies of the published book.

Eyes on the prize, poets.

The final judge is Vermont Poet Laureate, and award-winning poet, Mary Ruefle. 

This contest is open to all Vermont-based poets. Submissions of manuscripts of a first or second book, by a Vermont poet, will open on September 1st and close on October 31st, 2020. A cash prize of $500 will be awarded along with 50 copies. Sundog Poetry will provide assistance with promotion through a featured book launch and readings scheduled throughout the state. Manuscripts should be between 48 and 64 pages. All submissions must be authored by a poet who resides in Vermont; proof of residency will be requested along with a $20 application fee online via Submittable.

Submissions open September 1, 2020 and close at midnight on October 31, 2020

In related news, Sundog/Green Writers Press-affiliated poet Stephen Cramer has launched the recently published Turn It Up! Music in Poetry From Jazz to Hip-Hop.

ORIGINALLY FROM SEVEN DAYS ARTICLE.