Ploughshares is pleased to present Thomas Sayers Ellis with the sixteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of poems, The Maverick Room (Graywolf). The $1,500 award, which is named after Emerson College’s former president, honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and fiction.

This year’s judge was the poet John Skoyles, who is a Ploughshares trustee. In choosing the collection, Skoyles said: “In The Maverick Room, Thomas Sayers Ellis jostles sound and sense and comes up with a new and winning combination of both. These poems sing and whisper, shout and confide, in the same unmistakable voice. Lyric and narrative strains fuse in poem after poem, making the collection as far-reaching as it is profound.”

Thomas Sayers Ellis’s recent publications include Poetry, Tin House, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Zoland Poetry, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Contemporary Poets from 1951-1977. He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He has published two chapbooks, The Good Junk in 1996, which was included in the Agni/Graywolf series Take Three, and The Genuine Negro Hero in 2001, from Kent State University, and a chaplet, Song On, in 2005, from WinteRed Press. He has also coedited the anthology On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (Faber & Faber) and edited the forthcoming Quotes Community: Notes for Black Poets (Michigan).

Ellis was born in 1963 in Washington, D.C. Formerly an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University, Ellis is now teaching at Sarah Lawrence College and in Lesley University’s low-residency M.F.A. program. He lives in New York City and is working on a new manuscript, Colored Only: Identity Repair Poems.