3rd Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
Judge: Richard Wilbur
The winner of the third Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize was Rose Kelleher’s Bundle o’ Tinder.
Ms Kelleher, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, will receive a cheque for $3,000 and Waywiser will publish Bundle o’ Tinder – her first collection – in the fall of 2008.
It took the press’s screening panel two months of careful reading, deliberation and discussion to narrow the field, first to twenty semi-finalists, and then to ten finalists. The latter (stripped of all identifying references) were then sent to the 2007 judge, Richard Wilbur. Joe Harrison rang Ms Kelleher with Mr Wilbur’s decision in March.
Our congratulations go not just to Ms Kelleher and to those whose manuscripts reached the later stages of the contest – the finalists and semi-finalists are listed below – but to everyone else who entered. It is thanks to everyone who participated that the 2007 contest has been another resounding success.
If you would like to read poems from some of the manuscripts which made it as far as the semi-finals, together with biographical notes on their authors, please click on the links below.
It is the press’s hope, after the contest has been running for a while, to publish an anthology of poems by all of the contestants who have made it as far as the semi’s.
Winner
Rose Kelleher , Bundle o’ Tinder
Nominees
(in name order)
Bruce Berger, Snake Oil
Kimberley Burwick, The Norway Tree
Michaela Carter, Beauty for Ashes
Scott Coffel, Toucans in the Arctic
Kathryn Cowles, Eleanor, Eleanor, Not Your Real Name
Molly Fisk, The More Difficult Beauty
Jessica Greenbaum, Cover Songs of the Alphabet
Nick Lantz, Asymptote
Anthony Lacavaro, No More Magic Town
Dora Malech, Shore Ordered Ocean
Melissa Monroe, Frame Your Mark
Alison Powell, I Am Your Tin Ship
Margaret Rabb, Shoulderable Shine
Roy Seeger, The Boy Whose Hands Were Birds
Bradford Gray Telford, Perfect Hurt
Matthew Thorburn, Like Luck
Rhett Iseman Trull, From the Glass Cage
Ian Williams, You Know Who You Are
George Witte, Deniability