Claremont Graduate University Announces Winners of 2012 Tufts Poetry Awards

CLAREMONT, Calif., Feb. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Claremont Graduate University (CGU) is pleased to announce that Timothy Donnelly of Brooklyn, New York, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his book The Cloud Corporation (Wave, Picador). The award, given annually to a mid-career poet, is one of the largest monetary poetry prizes in the United States.

Katherine Larson, a research scientist and field ecologist from Tucson, Arizona, has won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book, Radial Symmetry (Yale University Press). The award is given annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise.

"These poets carry forward a tradition marked by distinguished past winners including Robert Wrigley, Tom Sleigh, Matthea Harvey, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Chase Twichell," said Wendy Martin, director of the Tufts Poetry Award program and vice provost of Claremont Graduate University. "CGU is proud to be able to make these important awards." 

The Cloud Corporation is Donnelly's second book. His first, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove), was published in 2003. His poems have been widely anthologized and translated, and they have appeared in such periodicals as A Public Space, Fence, Harper's, The Iowa Review, jubilat, Lana Turner, the Nation, the New Republic, and the Paris Review. This spring he is the Theodore H. Holmes '51 and Bernice Holmes Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing and Lewis Center for the Arts.  He has been poetry editor of the Boston Review since 1996 and is on the faculty of the Writing Program at Columbia University. 

Larson's Radial Symmetry was selected by poet Louise Gluck as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets and published by Yale University Press in 2011. In addition to the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, her work has been honored by a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and the Union League Civic and Arts Foundation Poetry Prize. She has spent the last decade working as a molecular biologist and field ecologist.

The Kingsley Tufts award was established at Claremont Graduate University by Kate Tufts in 1992 to honor the memory of her husband, who held executive positions in the Los Angeles Shipyards and wrote poetry as his avocation. The award is presented for a book by a poet who is past the beginning but has not reached the pinnacle of his or her career.

The Kate Tufts Discovery Award was initiated in 1993 and is presented annually for a first book of poetry.

"The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards are among the most important prizes in all of the arts, and they lift our spirits year after year," Claremont Graduate University President Deborah Freund said. "My most heartfelt congratulations go out to Timothy and Katherine for their extraordinary books. It will be an honor to host these wonderful and creative talents when they visit our campus this spring."

Final judges for the awards were:  Linda Gregerson, David Barber, Kate Gale, Ted Genoways, and Carl Phillips.

SOURCE Claremont Graduate University