(WASHINGTON, DC) Folger Poetry, the poetry program of the Folger Shakespeare Library, is pleased to announce Juliana Spahr is the recipient of the nineteenth 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. Spahr, who is an associate professor of English at Mills College, 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 9, 2009 at 7:30pm. A free seminar with the poet precedes the reading at 5pm. 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.
Juliana Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her second collection of poetry, Response (Sun & Moon Press, 1996). In addition, she has published six other book of poetry: This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against One Another (Palm Press, 2003), Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism (Explosive Books, 1998), and Nuclear (Leave Books, 1994). Her latest book, The Transformation (Atelos Press, 2007), is a kind of lyric prose memoir.
Spahr is the author of Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Alabama, 2001), a scholarly study of contemporary poetry that fosters a value of reading as communal, democratic, open process.
In addition to teaching and writing poetry, Spahr is also an active editor. Her collaborative efforts with Peter Gizzi (Writing from the New Coast: Technique), Claudia Rankine (American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language), Joan Retallack (Poetry and Pedagogy: the Challenge of the Contemporary), and Jena Osman (Chain, a literary journal), have enriched and extended how we think about contemporary writing and how contemporary writing helps us reconsider the work of teaching.
Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1966, Spahr received her BA from Bard College in Languages and Literatures and her PhD from the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, in English. She has taught at Siena College (1996-7), the University of Hawaii at Manoa (1997-2003), and Mills College (2003-present), where she is an associate professor of English.
“There’s a rhyme at the heart of Juliana Spahr’s work that suggests her motive and her movement: connective and collective,” said Joshua Weiner, who along with Claudia Rankine served as a 2009 Hardison Prize judge. “Her lines connect experiences and collect objects in a language that is daring for its plainness, clarity, analysis, self-deprecation, earnestness and irony, its unabashed lyrical phrasing, its unembarrassed willingness to make claims about the relation between self and world, between social consciousness and physical desire.”
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 Mary Kinzie (2008), 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).
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