December 2005—Graywolf Press is pleased to announce that Wilton, CT resident Sophie Cabot Black has been selected as the winner of the Connecticut Book Award for poetry.
The book awards are an annual event for the Connecticut Center for the Book, a program of the Hartford Public Library. More than 160 nominations for work published in 2004 were considered by 40 distinguished judges in the fields of writing, librarianship, book arts, academe, journalism and publishing. The winners, current or former state residents or authors whose work had a Connecticut setting, were chosen in seven categories as well as for a Lifetime Achievement award. Finalists for poetry included The Clerk’s Tale by Spencer Reece (Houghton Mifflin), Instrumentality by Ravi Shankar (Cherry Grove Collections), and Stumbling into the Light by Edwina Trentham (Antrim House)

THE DESCENT (September 2004), Sophie Cabot Black’s anticipated follow-up to her award-winning debut, The Misunderstanding of Nature, describes a restless spirit at the crossroads of love and damage, rapture and disenchantment, the mountain and the descent.

“Black’s voice is startling, jagged and implacable, and THE DESCENT is steep, precipitous and dazzling-all the way down from a hard-earned heaven.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

Sophie Cabot Black’s first poetry collection, The Misunderstanding of Nature, received the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. She lives in New York.

The mission of the Connecticut Center for the Book is to celebrate books, writers and readers who engender and sustain the life of the imagination and to highlight authors, illustrators, printers and the literary heritage of the state of Connecticut. The Connecticut Center for the Book is an affiliate of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress.

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. 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. For more information, please visit our web site: www.graywolfpress.org.

Poetry, 72 pages, Paperback Original (1-55597-406-6), US $14.00, September 2004. Graywolf Press titles are distributed to the trade by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.