We are proud to announce that Christian Barter has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for his new collection, Bye-Bye Land! His book will be published by BOA Editions in spring 2017, within the American Poets Continuum Series. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited; there is no formal submission process for this award.

Poet, actress, and Associate Editor of Poetry magazine, Isabella Gardner (1915-1981) published five celebrated collections of poetry, and was the first recipient of the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for Poetry. She championed the work of young and gifted poets, helping many of them find publication. This award carries an honorarium of $1,000 and is sponsored by the Gardner Charitable Trust.

The most recent winners of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award are Marsha de la O for Antidote for Night, Jillian Weise for The Book of Goodbyes, and Aracelis Girmay for Kingdom Animalia. The final selection of this award was made by BOA Publisher Peter Conners.

Christian Barter is the author of two previous books of poetry: In Someone Else’s House (winner of the 2014 Maine Literary Award) and The Singers I Prefer (a Lenore Marshall Prize finalist). His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Literary Review, Georgia Review and The American Scholar, and has been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and The PBS Newshour. A former Hodder Fellow in poetry at Princeton University, Barter is currently serving as the first-ever Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park, in honor of the centennial year of both Acadia and the National Park Service.

Congratulations, Chrisitan, and welcome to the BOA family!