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Announcing the winner of the 2009 Beatrice Hawley Award

The poetry cooperative congratulates the winner of the 2009 Beatrice Hawley Award, Reginald Dwayne Betts for his manuscript Shahid Reads His Own Palm. Betts is awarded $2,000 and his very fine book will be published in May 2010.

Reginald Dwayne Betts has been awarded the Holden Fellowship from MFA program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A Cave Canem fellow, his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and Poet Lore among others. He is a Breadloaf Writer’s Conference scholarship recipient and a graduate of Prince George’s Community College in Largo, MD and the University of Maryland in College Park, MD. In August 2009 his memoir, A Question of Freedom, will be published by Avery/Penguin.

Also chosen for publication, Chad Sweeney’s Parable of Hide and Seek.  Sweeney will receive $1,000, and his exceptional collection of poems will be published in September 2010.

Chad Sweeney is the author of two previous books of poetry, An Architecture and Arranging the Blaze, and the chapbook A Mirror to Shatter the Hammer.  Selected for Best American Poetry 2008, his poems have appeared in New American Writing, Colorado Review, Black Warrior, Verse, Volt and Barrow Street, and he has been awarded grants for translation and editing from the San Francisco Arts Commission. He is coeditor of Parthenon West Review and editor of the anthology Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds. He teaches poetry and is a Ph.D. candidate at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

2009 Beatrice Hawley Award Finalists were:
The Yellow House by Robin Behn, Let Me Open You a Swan by Deborah Bogen, Beware of Ideas by Michael Carlson, Plush by Cynthia Cruz, Beastiary, Apocrypha by Adam Day, Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin,  Patrick Donnelly, Mind over Matter by Gloria Frym, Hoodwinked by David Hernandez, Praying to the Black Cat by Henry Israeli, Enemy Love Song by Tanya Larkin, Maison by Rebecca Lehmann, Romantic Comedies by Mark Leidner, Wrack Line by Rob Schlegel, Black Stems, Red Blossoms by Derek Sheffield, How to Live on Bread and Music by Jennifer Sweeney, Blinking Ephemeral Valentine by Joni Wallace, Some Grain of Absolute among the Trembling by Amanda Warren, The Loudspeaker by Candelaria Xochiquetzal

2009 Beatrice Hawley Award Semi-finalists were:
Phrasebook for the Unrequited Country by R.S. Armstrong, Skykliner by George Bilgere, About Crows by Craig Blais, Rust or Go Missing by Lily Brown, Milk Dress by Nicole Cooley, Generation of Bird by Lucas Farrell, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land by Becka Mara Mckay, Awaiting Your Impossibilities by Donald Morrill, Getting to Shore by Lynne Potts, Paper by Craig Teicher, Epistles from the Guild of Lost Angels by Cody Todd

The Alice James Books Cooperative Board commends these poets for their accomplished work.

2008 Kinereth Gensler Awards
Alice James Books is pleased to announce the winners of the 2008 Kinereth Gensler Awards: Pageant by Joanna Fuhrman of Brooklyn, New York; Father Dirt by Mihaela Moscaliuc of Ocean, New Jersey; and How to Catch a Falling Knife by Daniel Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Each will receive $2,000 and will become members of the Alice James Books Poetry Cooperative Board. Their books will be published in November 2009, January 2010, and April 2010, respectively.

Joanna Fuhrman is the author of three previous poetry collections, Freud in Brooklyn, Ugh Ugh Ocean and Moraine, and her poems have appeared in anthologies published by HarperCollins, Hanging Loose, NYU, Carnegie Mellon and Soft Skull Press. She teaches creative writing at Rutgers University and in public schools and libraries through Poets House and Teachers & Writers Collaborative. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the playwright Robert Kerr.

Born and raised in Romania, Mihaela Moscaliuc came to the United States in 1996 to complete graduate work in American literature. Her poems, reviews, translations, and articles have appeared in The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, New Letters, Poetry International, Arts & Letters, Pleiades, and Soundings. She teaches at Monmouth University and lives in Ocean, New Jersey.

Daniel Johnson was born in Salem, Ohio. His poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies including Best American Poetry 2007, The Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary and I Have My Own Song for It: Modern Poems of Ohio. Johnson is the founding director of 826 Boston and, for over a decade, has taught writing in public schools, hospitals, and prisons. He lives with his wife in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Finalists for the award were: Here Be Monsters by Colin Cheney, You Ride Numbers by Ewa Chrusciel, May Everything Be This Soft and Brief by Shira Erlichman, Coffle by Reginald L. Flood, I Would Be the Brighter House by Kim Garcia, Self-Evident by Scott Hightower, Letter Written in this Life, Mailed from the Next by M. Smith Janson, and The Appetite by Aimee Walker.

Semifinalists for the award were: The Paintings Hidden Upstairs by Desirée Alvarez, Grass Whistle by Amy Dryansky, War vs. Outer Space by Daniel Hales, Time of Apricots by Nathan Hoks, Enemy Love Song by Tanya Larkin, Canary Objects by Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, Heath Ledger is Dead by Rena J. Mosteirin, Hover Coo by Frances Justine Post, and Loud Dreaming in a Quiet Room by Betsy Wheeler.