From our Cultural Partners, The Center for Book Arts:
The Center for Book Arts is
proud to announce that the winner of our 2012
Poetry Chapbook Competition is
V. Penelope
Pelizzon, from Willimantic,
Connecticut. Her manuscript Human
Field was chosen from a pool of over 300 submissions, to be produced this
summer in an edition of 100, hand bound and letterpress printed.
2012 judge Phillis Levin has this to say about Pelizzon's
work:
"The imaginative range of
Human Field is vast, the method of its
maker both subtle and bold—marrying bravado of spirit to maturity of vision. It
is thrilling to behold such protean shapes of feeling and thought, to hear the
voices inside a voice whose lines achieve a clarity that gives us access to
mystery."
Along with the
publication of her chapbook, and the reading in September, Pelizzon will have
the opportunity to spend a week at the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New
York
as one of
their Winter Shakers. The Millay Colony generously promotes the
development of writers, visual artists, and composers by providing a retreat for
creative work.
There will be a celebratory reading at the Center in NYC on Wednesday, September 12th to honor Pelizzon, as well as our two Honorable Mentions,
False Idols by Rob Stephens of Tallahassee, Florida and Women of Troy by Susan B.A. Somers-Willett of Austin, Texas. Along with printing the winning chapbook, The Center will also print up limited-edition broadsides of a poem by each of the honorable mentions, and a special edition by this year's judge, Phillis Levin. All of the published works will be available at the reading in September.
Congrats!
V. Penelope Pelizzon’s Nostos (Ohio University
Press, 2000), won the Hollis Summers Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s
Norma Farber First Book Award. She is also co-author of Tabloid, Inc: Crimes,
Newspapers, Narratives (Ohio State University Press, 2010), a study of the
relations among sensation journalism, photography, and film between 1927-1958.
Her poems and essays have appeared
in journals including Poetry, FIELD, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon
Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, and Fourth Genre, and her writing has received awards including
an Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency
Fellowship, a Pennsylvania Council for the Arts Grant, a John N. Wall Fellowship
in Poetry at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the "Discovery"/ The Nation
Award.