FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – Michael Walsh of Minneapolis has won the University of Arkansas Press’ inaugural $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize for his poetry collection, The Dirt Riddles. The book will be published in the spring of next year. Walsh will give a featured reading at the 2010 Arkansas Festival of Writers, sponsored by the university’s programs in creative writing and translation.

Walsh’s collection was chosen by judge Enid Shomer from the more than 700 manuscripts that had been submitted in the fall of last year. Walsh said he was “still walking on cloud nine from the news!” Shomer describes this “powerful first collection” as being “literally rooted in the earth and in the world of animal husbandry. You can taste these poems about life on a family dairy farm in your mouth. These lyric poems produce a music in which meaning is so perfectly fused to sound that we feel the words as we read.” Walsh previously published a chapbook, Adam Walking the Garden, and has another chapbook, Sleepwalks, forthcoming. He’s been a recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship and a residency at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

The University of Arkansas Press has been publishing poetry ever since Miller Williams became the press’ first director nearly 30 years ago. After his retirement from the press, poet Enid Shomer became the editor of the Poetry Series, but the press had never had a monetary prize for its poetry. Thanks to a benefit concert by Lucinda Williams and help from the university, the press was able to create an endowment that made the annual prize possible. The university’s creative writing program then added to the prize by agreeing to invite each winner to be a featured poet at the program’s annual Arkansas Festival of Writers held each spring.

There are two finalists in this year’s competition, and both of their books will be published in the spring of 2010 as well, Pamela Gemin for her collection, Another Creature, and Eric Leigh for Harm’s Way. Gemin teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and is the author of one previously published poetry collection, Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers. She is also the editor of three anthologies: Sweeping Beauty: Women Poets do Housework; Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation; and Are You Experienced: Baby Boom Poets at Midlife. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac.

Shomer calls Gemin’s poems “expansive, sassy and grateful, raw and merciful,” as they “follow a woman through both her mistaken and wise ways. Gemin takes us on a ride with the pedal pressed to the floor. Her kinetic lines have such unabashed energy that you know you’re listening with the amp on ten.”

Eric Leigh lives in San Francisco and received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan where he was honored with Hopwood Awards in poetry and non-fiction. His recent awards include a “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the New Letters Prize for Poetry, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry, and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize. Harm’s Way will be his first published collection of poetry.

 “At the heart of these compelling poems of identity,” Shomer says, “of the struggle to find and be found, to love and be loved is the ‘quiet where the best part / of us resides.’ Leigh’s poems about HIV make astounding music out of hard truths.”

The press will have a launch for the three new books at the annual conference of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs to be held in Denver in April 2010. The poets will do signings in the press’ booth. The press has proposed a special panel on the prize as part of the conference’s program. If it is accepted the poets will be introduced by Enid Shomer and read selections from their new books.