The New England Poetry Club is pleased to announce the recipients of its Grants for Individual Poetic Achievement: Sarah Audsley and Enzo Silon Surin. Members of the New England Poetry Club’s board served as judges. With this new grants program, the NEPC aims to amplify and encourage the work of Black and BIPOC poets as it continues to build a vibrant community through poetry.
Congratulations to the award-winners. Each will receive $3000 in recognition of their artistry and literary citizenship.
Sarah Audsley is a Korean American adoptee raised in rural Vermont whose work has appeared in The New England Review, The Cortland Review, Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, and elsewhere. Her recognitions include a 2022 Emerging Artist Award in Literature from Saint Botolph Club Foundation; support from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio; a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council; and The Rona Jaffe Foundation Creative Writing Graduate Fellowship at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. A member of The Starlings Collective and a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program, she lives and works in Johnson, Vermont. LANDLOCK X, her debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from
Texas Review Press in spring 2023.
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born poet, librettist, educator, publisher, and social advocate. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including When My Body Was A Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), winner of the 21st Annual Massachusetts Book Awards for Poetry, and the forthcoming American Scapegoat (Black Lawrence Press, spring 2023). Surin’s work has been featured in numerous publications including by the Poetry Foundation, and in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Da. He is co-editor of Where We Stand: Poems of Black Resilience (Cherry Castle Publishing, 2022), and the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation, a PEN New England Discovery Award, and a 2020 Denis Diderot Grant as an Artist-in-Residence at Chateau d’Orquevaux, France.