Graywolf Honored in the Poetry Foundation's Second Annual Pegasus Awards

Two of the three prestigious awards are granted to Graywolf poets

October 7, 2005—Graywolf Press is delighted to announce that authors Landis Everson and Tony Hoagland have won two of the three major awards given by the Poetry Foundation at the Second Annual Pegasus Awards. Winners were announced at dinner ceremony last evening in Chicago’s Millennium Park on October 6th.

Jeffrey Shotts, poetry editor at Graywolf Press said of the awards, “The Poetry Foundation sponsors some of the most significant and sought-after awards celebrating contemporary poetry, and it’s extremely gratifying to us at Graywolf Press to have both Landis Everson and Tony Hoagland as recipients this year. We’re excited to be collaborating with the Poetry Foundation to publish the first Emily Dickinson Award winner, Landis Everson, who at the age of 79 is a tremendous rediscovery for American poetry. And I can’t think of a more deserving recipient for the Mark Twain Poetry Award than Tony Hoagland, whose work, like Twain’s, brilliantly uses humor and narrative to coax out the assumptions, corruptions, and enjoyments of American culture.”

Landis Everson was selected as winner of the 2005 Emily Dickinson Award designed to recognize an American poet over the age of 50 who has yet to publish a first book. In addition to a cash prize of $10,000 to the author, Graywolf Press will have the honor of publishing EVERYTHING PRESERVED: POEMS 1955-2005 in Fall 2006. Everson, 79, was an inner member of the Berkeley Renaissance during the late 1940s with his friends Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser. Of his collection, John Barr, president of The Poetry Foundation, said, “Landis Everson came of age as a poet in Berkeley in the 1940s and 1950s—then put his writing aside for 43 years. His sudden return comes in a flood of poems written in the past two years. The fresh, accomplished voice at our elbow sounds like that of a major American poet—except that it belongs to none of them. It belongs to Landis Everson.”

Tony Hoagland was named the recipient of the second Mark Twain Poetry Award which recognizes a poet’s contribution to humor in American poetry. Hoagland will receive $25,000 along with the award Hoagland is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME. In presenting the award, Stephen Young, program director of the Poetry Foundation, said, “There is nothing escapist or diversionary about Tony Hoagland’s poetry. Here’s misery, death, envy, hypocrisy, and vanity. But the still sad music of humanity is played with such a light touch on an instrument so sympathetically tuned that one can’t help but laugh. Wit and morality rarely consort these days; it’s good to see them happily, often hilariously reunited in the winner’s poetry.” Graywolf Press will be publishing a collection of Hoagland’s essays, Real Sofistakashun, in Fall 2006.

William Logan was the recipient of the first Randall Jarrell Award in Poetry Criticism. A$10,000 award for criticism that is intelligent and learned, as well as lively and enjoyable to read.

The Poetry Foundation has established a family of prizes with an emphasis on new awards to under-recognized poets and types of poetry. Inaugurated in 2004, the Pegasus Awards are named annually in the fall. The Foundation believes that targeted prizes can help redress underappreciated accomplishments, diversify the kinds of poetry being written, as well as widen the audience for the art form. With this in mind it intends to create additional prizes in the years ahead.

Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. The Press has published significant books of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and translations for over thirty years, and has become one of the leading literary publishers in the country. Graywolf was founded in 1974 in Port Townsend, Washington, as a publisher of poetry, and moved to its current location in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1985, and expanded its lists to include fiction, nonfiction, and translation. Poetry has always remained at the heart of the Press.