Jillian Weise Wins the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award
Rochester, NY—Jillian Weise has been awarded the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for her new collection, The Book of Goodbyes. Her book will be published by BOA Editions in fall 2013. This award is given biennially to a poet with a new book of exceptional merit. Manuscripts are solicited and 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 $1000 and is sponsored by the Gardner Charitable Trust. Poets Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Michael Blumenthal (both former recipients of the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award) assisted in judging the award with the final selection being made by BOA Publisher Peter Conners. Jillian Weise is the author of The Amputee’s Guide to Sex (Soft Skull Press, 2007) and The Colony (Counterpoint/Soft Skull Press, 2010). Her poem “Incision” was selected for Poetry Everywhere, the short film series produced by PBS and the Poetry Foundation. Her work has appeared in A Public Space, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Tin House and the anthology Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. She studied at Florida State University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Cincinnati. She traveled to Tierra del Fuego, Argentina on a Fulbright Fellowship, and spent two years as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She teaches at Clemson and co-directs the Annual Clemson Literary Festival. BOA Editions, Ltd., the Rochester-based Pulitzer-Prize- and National-Book-Award-winning publishing house, received a 2001 New York State Governor’s Arts Award for overall artistic excellence. Now in its 35th year, BOA has published more than 200 books of American poetry, poetry in translation, fiction, and other literature.
