Winner
Saeed Jones for Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press)
The PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry of $5,000 is given in odd-numbered years and recognizes the high literary character of the published work to date of a new and emerging American poet of any age and the promise of further literary achievement.
From the Judges’ Citation
“Saeed Jones has written a necessary and urgent book. It interrogates the complications of race and sexuality and enacts how the pressures of history press into intimate, lived experience. We are moved by the liveness of this poet’s invention, the brightness of energy, and the range of tone. The voice is irresistible.”
2015 Judges
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, The Good Thief, and What the Living Do, and she is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. She has been a fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College and a recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, and Stanley Kunitz selected Howe for a Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, AGNI, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and The Partisan Review, among others. She is the Poet Laureate of New York State.
Mary Szybist is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. Her first book Granted won the 2004 GLCA New Writers Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College. Photo Credit: Joni Kabana
Craig Morgan Teicher is the author of four books, including To Keep Love Blurry and the forthcoming The Trembling Answers. He is currently editing the selected writings of Delmore Schwartz and working on a book of essays.
Past Winners
Ishion Hutchinson, Peter Covino, Nick Flynn, Richard Matthews, Dana Levin, Yerra Sugarman, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
Click here for additional information, including submission guidelines, for the award.