Samuel Washington Allen Prize: Danielle Legros Georges
Danielle Legros Georges is a creative and critical writer, translator, and academic who works in the fields of contemporary U.S. poetry, African-American and African-diasporic poetry and literature, Caribbean/Latin American and Haitian studies, and literary translation. She is the author of several books of poetry including Maroon (2001), The Dear Remote Nearness of You(2016), and Island Heart(2021), translations of the poems of 20th-century Haitian-French poet Ida Faubert. Her work has been supported by fellowships and grants from institutions including The American Antiquarian Society, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, MASS MoCA, the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Boston Foundation. In 2014, Legros Georges was named Boston’s Poet Laureate. Her four-year term included collaborations with area artists, literary organizations, museums, libraries, and schools; and representing Boston at international literary events. She is a contributing editor of Consequence Forum and Salamander Magazine; the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for explorations of Caribbean literature; a professor of creative writing at Lesley University; and an avid hiker.
Amy Lowell Prize: Doug Holder and Denise Provost
Doug Holder is the founder of the Ibbetson Street Press of Somerville, MA. He is currently the co-president of the New England Poetry Club, and the arts/editor for The Somerville Times. Holder was cited for his work as a poet, editor, publisher, and professor by the Massachusetts State House of Representatives (2015). The “Doug Holder Papers Collection” is archived at the University at Buffalo Libraries. Holder was the judge for the Frank O’Hara Award by the Worcester County Poetry Association as well as other awards. For the last 14 years he has been a lecturer in Creative Writing at Endicott College.
Denise Provost studied poetry at Bennington College. She became a lawyer, worked in local government, and served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, qarrtsiluni, Quadrille, Poetry Porch/ Sonnet Scroll, and Sanctuary, Provost was awarded Best Love Sonnet in the 2012 Maria C. Faust Sonnet Competition. She won the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize in 2021. Her books are Curious Peach (Ibbetson Street Press, 2019) and City of Stories (Cervena Barva Press, 2021.) She is co-president of the New England Poetry Club.
E.E. Cummings Prize: M.P. Carver
M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. A long-time community organizer, M.P. Carver began as Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in 2021. She is miCrO-founder of Molecule; a tiny lit mag, former Poetry Editor of Soundings East, and an Editor at YesNo Press. Her work appears in 9×5, an anthology of 5 new voices by Only Human Press. In 2022, her poem “You & God & I” won the NEPC’s E.E. Cummings Prize. Her chapbook, Selachimorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mantis, MER Vox, Meat for Tea, Jubilat, and others. She teaches writing at Salem State University. More at mpcarver.com.
Diana Der Hovanessian Prize: J. Kates
J. Kates is a minor poet, a literary translator and the president and co-director of Zephyr Press. He has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation and a Käpylä Translation Prize. He has published three chapbooks of his own poems: Mappemonde (Oyster River Press) Metes and Bounds (Accents Publishing) and The Old Testament (Cold Hub Press) and two full books, The Briar Patch (Hobblebush Books) and Places of Permanent Shade (Accent). He is the translator of The Score of the Game and An Offshoot of Sense (Tatiana Shcherbina); Say Thank You and Level with Us (Mikhail Aizenberg); When a Poet Sees a Chestnut Tree, Secret Wars, and I Have Invented Nothing (Jean-Pierre Rosnay); Corinthian Copper (Regina Derieva); Live by Fire (Aleksey Porvin); Thirty-nine Rooms (Nikolai Baitov); Psalms (Genrikh Sapgir); Muddy River (Sergey Stratanovsky); Selected Poems 1957-2009, and Sixty Years (Mikhail Yeryomin); and Paper-thin Skin (Aigerim Tazhi). He is the translation editor of Contemporary Russian Poetry, and the editor of In the Grip of Strange Thoughts: Russian Poetry in a New Era. A former president of the American Literary Translators Association, he is also the co-translator of six books of Latin American and Spanish poetry.
Jean Pedrick Prize: Daniel Barnum
Daniel Barnum grew up in southern New England and now lives in Philadelphia. They received their MFA from the Ohio State University, where their writing was supported by a Presidential Fellowship. Their poems and essays appear in Guernica, Sycamore Review, Washington Square Review, The Iowa Review, Salamander, Muzzle, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. Formerly editorial staff at West Branch and The Journal, they currently serve as an editor for Poetry Online (poetry.onl). Their chapbook, Names for Animals, was the 2020 selection for the Robin Becker Prize series from Seven Kitchens Press, and won the 2022 NEPC Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. More at: danielbarnum.net / @danielbarnummm