The Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine are pleased to announce the finalists for the 2005 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize a $25,000 award for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States during 2004.

The finalists, chosen from more than 150 entries, are:

Poems New and Selected
by Marianne Boruch
Oberlin College Press

Strike Sparks: Selected Poems, 1980-2002
by Sharon Olds Alfred A. Knopf

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
by Claudia Rankine
Graywolf Press

New and Selected Poems
by Michael Ryan
Houghton Mifflin

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003
by Jean Valentine
Wesleyan University Press

The Displaced of Capital
by Anne Winters
University of Chicago Press

The winner of the prize will be announced in October. The judges for this year's contest are Louise Glück, Robert Pinsky, and Alan Shapiro. An essay by Robert Pinsky on the prize-winning collection will appear in The Nation, along with a selection of poems from the book. The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is endowed by a gift to the Academy of American Poets from the New Hope Foundation, which for more than forty years worked to support world peace, literature, and the arts. The Nation first joined with the New Hope Foundation to present the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1982. Previous winners of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize include John Ashbery, Sterling A. Brown, Hayden Carruth, Wanda Coleman, Cid Corman, Madeline DeFrees, David Ferry, Eamon Grennan, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, John Haines, Donald Hall, Fanny Howe, Josephine Jacobsen, Mark Jarman, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, Thomas McGrath, W. S. Merwin, Josephine Miles, Howard Moss, Robert Pinsky, Donald Revell, Adrienne Rich, Michael Ryan, George Starbuck, Allen Tate, and Charles Wright.

The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize was established in 1975 by the New Hope Foundation in memory of Lenore Marshall (1897–1971), a poet, novelist, essayist, and political activist. Lenore Marshall was the author of three novels, three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and selections from her notebooks. Her work also appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Review, Partisan Review, and other literary magazines. In 1956 she helped found the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the citizens’ organization that lobbied successfully for passage of the 1963 partial nuclear test ban treaty.

The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. The preeminent organization in the country dedicated to the art of poetry, the Academy administers many important programs, including National Poetry Month (April), the Online Poetry Classroom, the Poetry Audio Archive, and Poets.org, our award-winning website. The Academy also conducts High School Poetry Workshops for New York City students each year and publishes the biannual journal, American Poet. In addition, the Academy administers the most important collection of poetry awards in the United States. These include the Wallace Stevens Award, the Academy Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the James Laughlin Award, the Walt Whitman Award, the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and student prizes at nearly 200 colleges and universities nationwide.

The Nation, founded in 1865, is America’s oldest weekly magazine. Well known as a journal of political analysis, The Nation also has a long and distinguished literary history. Such notable writers as Henry James, William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell were among its original contributors. Many poets have contributed to its pages, including T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Robert Lowell. Each year the magazine and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y co-sponsor "Discovery"/The Nation, an award for younger poets