VSC Fellowship and Iowa Prize Press Release

vtstudiocenterI was so thrilled to learn that I’ve been awarded a James Merrill Poetry Fellowship for a month-long writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. I will head to Johnson, Vermont for a month in spring 2016.

uiplogoIn other news, the University of Iowa Press has put out a press release announcing the winners of the 2016 Iowa Poetry Prize. It can be found on Facebook. I was excited to learn who the co-winner was. Huge congrats to John Blair. I can’t wait to read his forthcoming collection, Playful Song Called Beautiful.

The press release:

The 2015 Iowa Poetry Prize is awarded to John Blair’s Playful Song Called Beautiful and Lindsay Tigue’s System of Ghosts. This year’s judge was University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop visiting professor Craig Morgan Teicher.

Teicher writes of Blair’s Playful Song Called Beautiful, “… rolling tercets become the unlikely medium for all manner of slippery, expansive, and emotive thinking. For Blair, poetry’s shifting, mutable meaning is ‘all the comfort you need, all/ the comfort you get.’”

Playful Song Called Beautiful is Blair’s third book of poetry. His work has appeared in literary journals such as Poetry,The New York Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, The Antioch Review, New Letters. His poetry collection The Green Girls  won the 2003 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize; and his short story collection American Standard was awarded the 2002 Drue-Heinz Literature Prize. Blair is a professor of American literature, and directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

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Of System of Ghosts, Teicher says, “Tigue is wary of knowledge, of what it gets used to justify: ‘I always question/ the most rigid convictions,’ she writes. What Tigue [seeks] in all this minutiae, these forgotten facts, is what everyone wants, what everyone’s afraid [of not finding]: recognition, company, balm for [an] aloneness that starts at the edge of one’s skull. It’s why ‘I wake you at night,’ and it’s why you’ll read this book again and again.”

Lindsay Tigue was raised in Michigan. Her poems and stories have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Blackbird, Rattle, Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other literary journals. She now lives in Athens, Georgia, where she is a current PhD student in creative writing at the University of Georgia. System of Ghosts will be her first book.

Playful Song Called Beautiful and System of Ghosts will be published in April of 2016.

Media Contact: Allison Means, UI Press, allison-means@uiowa.edu.

For more information on the Iowa Poetry Prize please visit: www.uiowapress.org.