San Francisco State University :: The Poetry Center

Main Menu

Awards

The Poetry Center Book Award

The Poetry Center Book Award has been presented annually since 1980 by The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, to a single outstanding book of poetry published in the prior year. The Poetry Center Book Award carries a cash prize and an invitation to read, along with the award judge, at The Poetry Center in San Francisco.

POETRY CENTER BOOK AWARD, 1980-2010.

Guidelines

The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University seeks submissions for the annual Poetry Center Book Award.

Deadline for submission of 2011 books is January 31, 2012.

Entrees will be accepted for the 2011 award from JULY 1, 2011 thru JANUARY 31, 2012.

Published original books by a single author (no collaborative works, anthologies, translations, or manuscripts) must be copyrighted 2011. Entrees can be submitted by publisher, author, or by a reader.

An entry fee of $10 per book (all of which goes directly to the benefit of the award winner and award judge) must accompany each book.

Please include a cover letter indicating the author's name, book title(s), name of person or publisher issuing check, and check number.

Checks should be payable to The Poetry Center and entrees mailed to:

The Poetry Center/SFSU
2010 Book Award
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco CA 94132

The judge for the award will not be announced in advance.

PRESS RELEASE : SPRING 2011

The Poetry Center is pleased to announce that Joseph Stroud’s OF THIS WORLD: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (Copper Canyon) has been selected by award judge Peter Weltner to receive the annual Poetry Center Book Award.

The Poetry Center Book Award has been presented annually by The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University since 1980 to a single outstanding book of poetry published in the previous year. The Poetry Center Book Award carries a cash prize and an invitation to read, along with the award judge, at The Poetry Center in San Francisco. Joseph Stroud and Peter Weltner will each read for the Poetry Center on May 5, 2011.

• Thursday MAY 05
Poetry Center Book Award reading
Joseph Stroud (Santa Cruz) and Peter Weltner (San Francisco)
3:30 pm @ the Poetry Center, HUM 512, SFSU, free

Peter Weltner in his judge’s citation writes:

'In OF THIS WORLD, Joseph Stroud’s poems know “words as praise, as a way of seeing,” “singing of home, death, a blossoming tree.” For a poet, to say yes to life with clear eyes and a generous heart may be at once the hardest struggle and most fundamental need. “I want to write a poem,” Stroud says, “that will embody in you something alien.” The strange, sometimes dark beauty of what might otherwise seem ordinary and simple inhabits these poems, as it does us who read them, the world so acutely observed it is intensified into music. Stroud delights in the radiant songs of the everyday way. “See how the snow drifts down,” he writes, “look how happy I am.”'

On being notified of his book being selected for the Poetry Center Book Award, Joseph Stroud wrote:

'What makes it even more special is the fact that I was a student in English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State from 1963 to 1968 and I believe during that time that I attended every poetry reading the Poetry Center put on; it was I think the finest reading series in the country, and it made an indelible impression on me and did a great deal in informing my own poetry.'

In making his selection from some 200 books of poetry published in 2009, award judge Peter Weltner cited ten other books as “also particularly outstanding”:

1. Sean Nevin, Oblivio Gate (Crab Orchard)
2. Daniel Simko, The Arrival (Four Way)
3. Kazim Ali, Bright Felon (Wesleyan)
4. Alberto Ríos, The Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon)
5. Jesse Lee Kercheval, Cinema Muto (Crab Orchard)
6. Don Bogen, An Algebra (University of Chicago Press)
7. D. A. Powell, Chronic (Graywolf Press)
8. Jason Shinder, Stupid Hope (Graywolf Press)
9. Carey Salerno, Shelter (Alice James)
10. Tara Bray, Mistaken for Song (Persea Books)

Joseph Stroud is the author of five books of poetry: In the Sleep of Rivers, Signatures, Below Cold Mountain, Country of Light, and Of This World: New and Selected Poems, and five limited editions: Unzen, Burning the Years, Three Odes of Pablo Neruda, Ukiyo-e, and Night Psalms. His work has earned a Pushcart Prize and he was selected by the Poet Laureate of the United States for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in Poetry from the Library of Congress. His poems have been featured in the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times as well as on Garrison Keillor’s Writers Almanac from National Public Radio. His most recent book, Of This World, won the Poetry Center Book Award for best book published in 2009, and it was also a finalist for the PEN Literary Award USA, the California Book of the Year Award, and the Northern California Book Award.

Peter Weltner has published two collections of stories, one collection of three short novels, two novels, three poetry chapbooks, and, most recently, a full length collection of poems, News from the World at My Birth: A History. A collaboration with the artist Galen Garwood, The One-Winged Body, will appear early in 2011. He taught modern and contemporary poetry and fiction at San Francisco State University from 1969 to 2006.

For further information, including the roll-call of previous books selected to receive The Poetry Center Book Award, along with participating award judges, view list of past winners.

Home | San Francisco State University © 2006
Valid XHTML, CSS.