The Alternative Press

PATERSON, NJ - A reading and award ceremony for the 2012 Paterson Poetry Prize will take place on Sat., April 6 at the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College.  This free program will begin at 1:00 PM at the historic Hamilton Club Building, 32 Church Street, corner of Ellison, downtown Paterson.

First Prize Winner, Dorianne Laux, will read from her award-winning poetry book, The Book of Men, (W.W. Norton & Company, New York, NY).  Jim Reese, a panel judge and author of ghost on 3^rd, had this to say about The Book of Men: “Laux’s poems embed themselves simultaneously in the literal and the mythic to achieve real insight and transcendence.  The narrative voices in this collection live and get down with the best of ‘em, reminding us where authentic poetry comes from—the heart.”

Several finalists will also read their poetry, including Martín Espada, The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton & Company, NY, NY); Jason Schossler, Mud Cakes(Bona Fide Books, Tahoe Paradise, CA), and Joe Wilkins, Killing the Murnion Dogs (Black Lawrence Press, NY, NY) .

The Paterson Poetry Prize of $1,000 is given annually by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College for a book of poetry (48 pages or more) published in the previous year, with a minimum press run of 500 copies.  The deadline for 2013 awards is February 1, 2014.  For further information, contact Smita Desai at The Poetry Center at (973) 684-6555 or visit www.pccc.edu/poetry.

Here's more about the prize winners:

Dorianne Laux’s fifth collection, The Book of Men (W. W. Norton & Company), is the winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize.  Also, she is the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), which received the Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.  Co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, Laux is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  In 2001, she was invited by the late poet laureate, Stanley Kunitz, to read at the Library of Congress.   Laux has taught at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing and now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, NC, where she is on the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.

Martín Espada is the author of several collections of poetry, including The Republic of Poetry (2006), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, andAlabanza: New and Selected Poems (1982-2002), which received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was named an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year.  Espada is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he teaches creative writing, Latino poetry, and the work of Pablo Neruda.

Jason Schossler is the 2010 winner of the Melissa Lanitis Gregory Poetry Prize, a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, the recipient of the 2009 Edwin Markham Prize in Poetry, and the 2010 Emerging Writer Award from Grist: The Journal for Writers.  Jason teaches writing at Temple University and Ursinus College, and also works as a freelance legal journalist for Thomson Reuters.  Jason lives in Philadelphia, Pa.

Joe Wilkins  is the author of the poetry chapbook, Ragged Point Road (Main Street Rag, 2006), and his poems, essays, and stories have appeared in theGeorgia Review, the Southern Review, Northwest Review, the Sun, Orion, Slate, and Best New Poets, among other magazines and literary journals. His work has won Boulevard Magazine’s Emerging Poets Contest and the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers, and he is the 2009 recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center.  He teaches writing at Waldorf College.