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2007 BARNARD WOMEN POETS PRIZE AWARDED TO
LISA WILLIAMS
NEW YORK, NY – On April 17, Barnard College announced that writer
Joyce Carol Oates has chosen Lisa Williams and her collection, Woman
Reading to the Sea, as the winner of the 2007 Barnard Women Poets
Prize, an annual contest to publish an emerging poet’s second
collection. The Prize, awarded jointly by Women Poets at Barnard and
the publisher W.W. Norton & Company, includes publication of the work
and a free public reading at Barnard.
This year’s contest was judged by writer Joyce Carol Oates, the
three-time Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of, among other writings,
eight volumes of poetry, 30 collections of short stories, and more
than 45 novels. She describes Williams’ collection as containing
poems of “arresting intelligence, precision, and beauty.” Oates
wrote, “In wonderfully crafted language, with the startling subtlety
of certain of Emily Dickinson’s poems, Lisa Williams takes us into
eerily imagined worlds – the interior of a jellyfish, and the
interior of a glacier. She beguiles us with the most seductive of
poetic possibilities . . . This slender volume constitutes a journey
of sorts, a pilgrimage ‘out’ that returns the questing poet . . .
to her own life. Lisa Williams is a poet of lyric gifts blessed with
a luminous intelligence and wit.”
Williams is an assistant professor of English at Centre College in
Danville, Kentucky. Her poems have been published in Raritan, The
New Republic, Poetry, New England Review, Literary Imagination,
Southwest Review, Georgia Review, and other magazines, as well as in
an anthology, American Poetry: Next Generation. Williams’ first
book of poems, The Hammered Dulcimer, won the May Swenson Poetry
Award and was published in 1998. She is the recipient of several
fellowships and awards, including the 2004-2005 Rome Prize in
Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Henry
Hoyns Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Prize, the Elliston
Prize, and the Walter E. Dakin fellowship. Her teaching interests
include creative writing and poetry of all periods.
Women Poets at Barnard, directed by assistant professor of English
and poet Saskia Hamilton, is a distinguished series that has offered
free, public readings at Barnard College by both emerging and
established poets for over twenty years. Guests have included
Adrienne Rich, Louise Gluck, Lyn Hejinian, Claudia Rankine, and
Rebecca Wolff.
Known for the strength of its writing program, Barnard’s faculty
includes Hamilton, novelist Mary Gordon ’71, and playwright Ellen
McLaughlin. Notable literary alumnae include Zora Neale Hurston
’28, Francine du Plessix Gray ’52, June Jordan ’57, Erica Jong
’63, Ntozake Shange ’70, Edwidge Dandicat ’90, and Pulitzer
Prize winners Anna Quindlen ’74 and Jhumpa Lahiri ’89.
About Barnard College
The idea was bold for its time. Founded in 1889, Barnard was the only
college in New York City, and one of the few in the nation, where
women could receive the same rigorous and challenging education
available to men. Today, Barnard is among the strongest colleges in
the country, and the most sought-after women’s college.
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