(WASHINGTON, DC) Folger Poetry, the poetry program of the Folger Shakespeare Library, is pleased to announce Mary Kinzie is the recipient of the eighteenth annual O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize. The Hardison Prize is the only major American prize to recognize a poet’s teaching as well as his or her art. Kinzie will receive a $10,000 cash award — one of the larger American poetry prizes — and a reading and reception at the Folger on Friday, October 17, 2008 at 7:30pm. The Hardison Prize is presented in memory of former Folger Shakespeare Library director O. B. Hardison, Jr., a scholar, teacher, and poet who established the Folger’s prestigious public programs, including Folger Poetry.
“Mary Kinzie reaches beyond established procedures and habits of feeling in poems distinguished by investigative precision, openness to process, heartbreaking lyricism, and keen intellection,” said Joshua Weiner, who, along with Claudia Rankine and Tom Sleigh, served as a 2008 Hardison Prize judge. “The formal rigor and disabused sensibility that have marked Kinzie’s earlier work have gained perceptive power and a new musical flexibility; the poems think hard and sound great. Such shining new work, coupled with her long record as a teacher and critic, throws into dramatic relief her impact on the culture of the art.”
Kinzie is the author of seven collections of poetry: California Sorrow (2007), Drift (2003), Ghost Ship (1996), Autumn Eros and Other Poems (1991), Summers of Vietnam and Other Poems (1990), Masked Women (1990), and The Threshold of the Year (1981).
Her work also includes two volumes of critical essays, The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling (1993) and The Judge is Fury: Dislocation of Form in Poetry (1994). She also wrote A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (1999), a critical handbook on poetry and prosody. Her essay on Iris Murdoch appeared in March 2001 as the introduction to the Penguin reissue of Murdoch’s Booker Prize-winning 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea.
Publishers Weekly proclaims that “Kinzie’s strong opinions, fierce emotions, and serious attention both to visual details and to philosophical claims have won attention both for her poetry and ambitiously minatory literary criticism.”
Mary Kinzie has won numerous awards and an artist grant from the Illinois Arts Council, the 1987 Elizabeth Matchett Stover Memorial Award in Poetry from Southwest Review, and the 1988 Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America. She was named a DeWitt Wallace Fellow at the MacDowell Colony in 1979 and in 1986 held a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry. In 2005-2006 she spent a year as a senior fellow in poetry at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina.
Born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1944, Kinzie did graduate work at the Free University of Berlin and Johns Hopkins University on Fulbright and Woodrow Wilson Fellowships. Professor at Northwestern University since 1975, she has taught the reading and writing of poetry, Victorian and modern literature, the reading and writing of fiction, American women poets, and the history and theory of prosody. Since 1979 she has served as head of the creative writing program at Northwestern.
ABOUT THE O. B. HARDISON, JR. POETRY PRIZE:
Founded in 1991, the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize is given annually to a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate the spirit of inquiry, imagination, daring, and scholarship exemplified in O. B. Hardison, Jr.’s life and work. The award acknowledges a poet whose excellent and noteworthy writing has not yet received major recognition and whose current teaching is making significant contributions to furthering the understanding of poetry and poetics. The award is presented each October at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library and accompanied by a reading given by the recipient.
Previous winners of the Hardison Poetry Prize are David Wojahn (2007), David Rivard (2006), Tony Hoagland (2005), Reginald Gibbons (2004), Cornelius Eady (2003), Ellen Bryant Voight (2002), David St. John (2001), Rachel Hadas (2000), Alan Shapiro (1999), Heather McHugh (1998), Frank Bidart (1997), Jorie Graham (1996), E. Ethelbert Miller (1995), R.H.W. Dillard (1994), John Frederick Nims (1993), Cynthia MacDonald (1992), and Brendan Galvin (1991).
ABOUT FOLGER POETRY:
Celebrating its 40th season at the Folger in 2008-2009, Folger Poetry is one of the country’s oldest poetry reading programs and is noted for presenting a wide range of emerging voices alongside more established poets. Major funding is provided by the O. B. Hardison Poetry Endowment, other generous public and private donors, and the Lannan Foundation, which sponsors readings at the Folger and at Georgetown University, as well as a collaborative undergraduate learning program with the Lannan Fellows.
Home to the world’s largest Shakespeare collection, Folger Shakespeare Library is a world-class center for scholarship, learning, culture, and the arts. Learn more at www.folger.edu.
Photo available upon request.
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