Karen Skolfield’s “Battle Dress” Chosen for Barnard Women Poets Prize

Contact:
Alli Cooke
212.854.2037
mediarelations@barnard.edu

NEW YORK, May 3, 2018 – Karen Skolfield’s Battle Dress has been selected for the 2018 Barnard Women Poets Prize. The prize, chosen this year by award-winning poet Rosanna Warren, recognizes the best second collection of poems by an American woman poet, and has been awarded ten times since 2003 when the collaboration between Women Poets at Barnard and W.W. Norton & Company began. Skolfield’s book will be published in the fall of 2019 by W.W. Norton & Company, and she will also receive $1,500 and give a reading at Barnard College upon the book’s release.

"Karen Skolfield's latest work asks us to picture the life of a woman soldier, taking readers through barracks and battles in munificently inventive language, every element crackling with life,” said Warren. “Battle Dress is a terrific and sometimes terrifying collection – morally complex, rhythmic, tough-minded, and original. These poems show the imagination as the faculty that keeps us human."

Skolfield is also the author of Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press, 2013), which won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry and the First Book Award from Zone 3 Press. She is the recipient of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review, the 2015 Robert H. Winner award from the Poetry Society of America, and the 2015 Arts & Humanities Award from New England Public Radio. A U.S. Army veteran, Skolfield teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned her Master of Fine Arts.

Past Barnard Women Poets Prize winners include Brittany Perham for Double Portrait, Sandra Lim for The Wilderness, Cathy Park Hong for Dance Dance Revolution and Rebecca Wolf for Figment. Previous judges include Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück and Jorie Graham.

The Barnard Women Poets Prize seeks to support writers in the early stages of their careers, and is consistent with the College’s strong tradition in creative writing. Barnard College has long been known for producing leading authors including Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anna Quindlen, Ntozake Shange and Edwidge Danticat, to name a few.

About Barnard College

Barnard provides a singular educational experience, as a world-renowned liberal arts college with the academic resources of Columbia University and the City of New York as an extended classroom. Founded in 1889, Barnard was one of the few colleges in the nation where women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education available to men. Today, Barnard is one of the most selective academic institutions in the country and remains devoted to empowering extraordinary women to become even more exceptional. For more information on Barnard College, contact Barnard Media Relations at mediarelations@barnard.edu or 212-854-2037.

About W.W. Norton & Company

W.W. Norton & Company is the nation’s largest independent, employee-owned book publishing house.  Founded by William Warder Norton in 1923, the firm now publishes approximately 450 books annually in its combined divisions and continues to adhere to its original motto, “Books that Live,” striving to publish works of enduring distinction in the areas of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and textbooks.

Brittany Perham’s “Double Portrait” Selected for Barnard Women Poets Prize

Contact:

Anna O’Sullivan
 212-854-7907
aosullivan@barnard.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

NEW YORK, June 20, 2016—Award-winning poet and playwright Claudia Rankine selected Brittany Perham’s, “Double Portrait,” for the 2016 Barnard Women Poets Prize. The book will be published in 2017 by W.W. Norton & Company. The prize is given for the best second collection of poems by an American woman poet and has been awarded nine times since 2003 when the collaboration between Women Poets at Barnard and W.W. Norton & Company first began.  In addition to having her collection of poems published, Perham will receive $1,500 and will give a reading at Barnard College upon publication of “Double Portrait” in the fall of 2017.

“‘Double Portrait,’ by turns playful, mournful, indulgent, musical, insightful, and all the way human, comes clean about our most driving desires. In the tradition of love poems to the beloved or the parent or the world, Brittany Perham takes exuberance to the forms that complement it. Imaginative and familiar, the result is full of humor that is both rueful and sensual,” Rankine, who judged the competition, said.

Perham is also the author of “The Curiosities” (Free Verse Editions, 2012), and a collaborative work with Kim Addonizio, “The Night Could Go in Either Direction” (Slapering Hol Press, 2016). In 2015, she was the recipient of the Stover Memorial Award given by “Southwest Review”. She is currently a Jones Lecturer in the Stanford Creative Writing Program and lives in San Francisco, California.

Past Barnard Women Poets Prize winners include Sandra Lim for “The Wilderness,” Cathy Park Hong for “Dance Dance Revolution” and Rebecca Wolf for “Figment.” Past judges include Adrienne Rich, Louise Glück and Jorie Graham. 

The Barnard Women Poets Prize seeks to support writers in the early stages of their careers, and is consistent with the College’s strong tradition in creative writing. Barnard College has long been known for producing leading authors including Zora Neale Hurston, Mary Gordon, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anna Quindlen, Ntozake Shange, Lydia Davis and Edwidge Danticat, to name a few.

About Barnard College
Founded in 1889, Barnard was the only college in New York City, and one of the few in the nation, where women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education available to men. Today, as the world-renowned liberal arts college for women at Columbia University, Barnard College remains devoted to empowering extraordinary women to become even more exceptional. 

About W. W. Norton & Company

W.W. Norton & Company is the nation’s largest independent, employee-owned book publishing house.  Founded by William Warder Norton in 1923, the firm now publishes approximately 450 books annually in its combined divisions and continues to adhere to its original motto, “Books that Live,” striving to publish works of enduring distinction in the areas of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and textbooks.

Contact
For more information about the Barnard Women Poets Prize, contact Barnard College Media Relations at mediarelations@barnard.edu or 212-854-2037.

Sandra Lim Awarded 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize

April 8, 2013

Barnard has announced that The Wilderness by Sandra Lim has received the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize for the best second collection of poems by an American woman poet. The biennial prize, awarded jointly by Women Poets at Barnard and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company, includes publication of the work and a free public reading at Barnard. The Wilderness will be published in 2014 by W. W. Norton & Company.

“In its stern, quiet way The Wilderness is as thrilling a book as I have read in a very long time,” writes former Poet Laureate of the United States Louise Glück, also winner of the Pulitzer and Bollingen Prizes, who judged this year’s competition.

Lim’s first book, Loveliest Grotesque, won the 2006 Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Court Green, Guernica, Colorado Review, American Letters & Commentary, and other journals. Honors for her work include fellowships to The MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, she is an assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Below is a poem from The Wilderness. Lim will read from her work at Barnard during the upcoming fall semester.

SNOWDROPS

Spring comes forward as a late-winter confection, and I cannot decide if it advances a philosophy of meekness or daring.

This year’s snowdrops: is it that they are spare, and have a slightly fraught lucidity, or are they proof that pain, too, can be ornate?

Even a propped skull is human nature. And its humor is monstrous, rich with an existence that owes nothing to anyone.

Fat little pearls against the ice, battering softly, try even fewer qualities—

To say that you love someone or something to death is to hover around the draw of irrevocability.

More faith is asked of us, a trained imagination against the ice-white.

Traci Brimhall Awarded Barnard Women Poets Prize

May 3, 2011

Barnard College announced today that Our Lady of the Ruins by Traci Brimhall has received the 2011 Barnard Women Poets Prize for the best second collection of poems by an American woman poet. The biennial Prize, awarded jointly by Women Poets at Barnard and the publisher W.W. Norton & Company, includes publication of the work and a free public reading at Barnard. Our Lady of the Ruins will be published by W. W. Norton in 2012.

“Our Lady of the Ruins is poetry for the new century: awake to the world, spiritually profound, and radiant with lyric intelligence,” writes Carolyn Forché, the award-winning author of five poetry collections who judged this year’s competition.

Brimhall’s first book, Rookery, won the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Kenyon Review, Slate, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. She was the 2008-09 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and currently teaches at Western Michigan University, where she is a doctoral associate and King/Chávez/Parks Fellow.

Below is a selection of short poems by Brimhall, who will read from her work at Barnard during the upcoming fall semester.

Gnostic Fugue

A prophet says you will be resurrected
and then you will die.

The villagers' lost children
are found in the city, flies laying eggs

in the nests of their ears.
After the burial, two soldiers make love

against the wall between the old ruin
and the new. But this is their rapture, not yours.

You are the doubter and the doubt,
worshipping a book you can't read.

The awful quiet in your heart
is not the peace you were promised,

not the trembling hush before a revelation,
not a prelude to an earthquake,

not God’s silence, but his breathlessness.


- previously appeared in Parthenon West Review

Winter Nocturne

We wait for the moon to rise so we can enter
the woods and hang statues of saints from the trees.

In a thicket, a doe bent in what could be prayer
nudges her young, waiting for it to rise

from its cold sleep. Owls listen for mice beneath
the snow. The messenger of the gods is also a god.

We carry the dead fawn to the frozen pond,
and in spring it disappears. The ice weakens,  

water hides the body. Nothing will hurt us
like love, not even the deer that follows us when

we return to collect the unbroken saints, last season’s
nests cradled between branches, all of them empty.


- previously appeared in New South

Jubilee

By now I know the miles my blood travels
each year. I know the mendicant's hunger—

hollowness moves in, my body becomes
the cave I am seeking. I drag the jaws

of a dead wolf from its den for the meat between
his teeth. I am red and reeking with the journey.

I am a ravening animal weeping for the angel
with broken hands standing sentry over the ossuary.

I am harrowed, hallowed. I am stone, stone,
I have not trembled. Love nails me to the world.

To learn more about the Barnard Women Poets Prize, visit the English Department website.

The 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Sandra Beasley for I Was the Jukebox, chosen by Joy Harjo.

Harjo writes of Beasley's work, "there is no wavering of image or sign. . . these poems are fresh, crisp and muscular...they are decisive and fearless." Harjo explains, "every object, icon or historical moment has a soul with a voice," and claims that, "in these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now."

Beasley's first book, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize.  Her recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Cave Wall, Blackbird, and Poetry.  Honors for her work include the 2008 Poets & Writers Maureen Egen Exchange Award, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and fellowships to the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Millay Colony, and Virginia Center for Creative Arts.  She serves on the Board of the Writer's Center and writes for the Washington Post Magazine in Washington, D.C.  She is at work on Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life.

The 2007 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Lisa Williams for Woman Reading to the Sea, chosen by Joyce Carol Oates.

In poems of “arresting intelligence, precision, and beauty” (Joyce Carol Oates), Lisa Williams takes on the subjects of beauty, language, nature, mortality, and myth in Woman Reading to the Sea.  Insistently musical, her second collection displays a wide variety of rhythms and forms, as well as an improvisational delight in the sounds of language.  “Lisa Williams takes us into eerily imagined worlds,” Oates writes, “the interior of a jellyfish, and the interior of a glacier; she beguiles us with the most seductive of poetic possibilities—that we might be absorbed into the consciousness of the beautiful and inarticulate world of nature.”

Lisa Williams is also the author of The Hammered Dulcimer, and was the recipient of the Rome Prize in 2004.  She teaches at Centre College and lives in Danville, Kentucky.  Woman Reading to the Sea will be published in 2008 by W.W. Norton & Co.  Williams read from the book as part of the 2008 Women Poets at Barnard series upon publication.

The 2006 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Cathy Park Hong for Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich.

Rich praised "the mixture of imagination, language and historical consciousness” in the book. “Hong's work is passionate, artful, worldly.  It makes a reader feel and think simultaneously, and rather then implying a nihilistic or negative vision of the future, it leaves this reader, at least, revitalized.”

Cathy Park Hong won a Van Lier Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize for her first book, Translating Mo'um.  She is also the recipient of a Fullbright Fellowship (South Korea), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, and the Village Voice Mary Wright Fellowship for Minority Reporters.  She works as a freelance journalist and teaches at the New School in New York City.

Dance Dance Revolution will be published in 2007 by W.W. Norton & Co. Hong will read from the book as part of the 2007 Women Poets at Barnard series upon publication

The 2005 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Julie Sheehan for Orient Point.

Sheehan's first book, Thaw, won the 2000 Poets Out Loud Prize. Her poems have appeared in Parnassus, Paris Review, Raritan, Salmagundi, Ploughshares, Rattapallax, Southwest Review, Kenyon Review and Yale Review, among many others. In 2003, Paris Review awarded her the Conners Prize for "Brown-Headed Cowbirds." 

Poet Laureate Billy Collins recently chose "Hate Poem" for the forthcoming collection of poetry by Random House (2005), titled 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day.  Sheehan lives in Springs, Long Island.

Orient Point, will be published in 2006.  Sheehan will also give a public reading of her work as part of the distinguished Women Poets at Barnard series in 2006 to coincide with the publication of her book.

The 2004 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Tessa Rumsey for The Return Message, chosen by Jorie Graham.

Rumsey's first book, Assembling the Shepherd, won the 1998 Contemporary Poetry Series Competition and was published the University of Georgia Press in 1999. Rumsey's poems have recently appeared in Conjunctions, The Boston Review, The Washington Post, and Verse. 

Rumsey received her B.A. in liberal arts from Sarah Lawrence College, an M.F.A in creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and an M.A. in Visual Criticism from the California College of the Arts.  She lives in San Francisco.  

As part of the Women Poets at Barnard reading series, Rumsey read from her work to coincide with the publication of her book, The Return Message, which was be published by W.W. Norton in April 2005.

The 2003 Barnard Women Poets Prize was awarded to Rebecca Wolff for her second book, Figment, chosen by Eavan Boland and Claudia Rankine.

Wolff’s first book, Manderley, was selected for the 2000 National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky, and received critical acclaim.  Publisher’s Weekly wrote that it "tears mosses off the old manse of Du Maurier's haunted classic Rebecca, tosses them with a heady late ’90s bravura."

Wolff earned a MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop in 1993 and founded the literary journal Fence in 1997.  Her poems have appeared in Paris Review, Grand Street, Exquisite Corpse, and other journals.  She lives in New York City where she edits Fence and works as a freelance copyeditor.

Figment will be published by W. W. Norton & Co. in the spring of 2004, and Barnard will host a reading to celebrate the book.