University of Arkansas Press Book Wins Distinguished Award

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Claremont Graduate College has announced that the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award winner is Patrick Phillips for his collection of poetry, “Chattahoochee,” published by the University of Arkansas Press.

The $10,000 award is given annually to an emerging poet “of genuine promise” for a first book. The book was chosen from a field of about 180 entries, and its poems are drawn from Phillips’s experiences growing up in the South - exploring themes of memory, family and place.

Phillips was born and raised in Atlanta, Ga., and graduated from Tufts University and the University of Maryland. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen and has held fellowships at the MacDowell and Millay colonies for the arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children. His honors include a 2003 “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, the Sjoberg Translation Prize from the American Scandinavian Foundation, and he was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.

His poems have already garnered many awards and have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, the Gettysburg Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the New England Review, Ploughshares and DoubleTake. Phillips is currently a Henry Mitchell MacCracken Fellow at New York University.

The book is published in the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer. Four new collections are published in the series each year. “Chattahoochee” was published in the fall of 2004.

This year’s final judging panel included Robert Wrigley, professor of English at the University of Idaho; former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky; New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn; Carol Muske Dukes, professor of English and director of the doctoral program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California; and interim final judge Eugene Gloria, professor of English and creative writing at DePauw University.

Preliminary judges were Barbara Ras, director of Trinity University Press; Derick Burleson, poet and professor in the MFA program at the University of Alaska; and Eugene Gloria. The jury also awards the annual $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award - the largest prize for a single book of poetry. This year’s winner is Michael Ryan.

Endowed by the late philanthropist Kate Frost Tufts, the annual awards were named in honor of her husband, Kingsley Tufts, who produced a large body of poetry in the 1930s that appeared in such magazines and journals as Harper’s, The American Scholar, The New Yorker, Esquire and Coronet. After his death in 1991, Kate Tufts began making a reality of their shared vision for a poetry awards program. In little more than a year’s time, she sold her ancestral home and funded the awards.

Both awards will be presented at the 13th annual Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards Ceremony at the Doheny Mansion on the campus of Mount St. Mary’s College in Los Angeles on April 22. The event will be free and open to the public.