FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas press has published the winner and finalist for its 2011 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. The winner, Lovely Asunder by Danielle Cadena Deulen (paperback, $16), was awarded the contest’s $5,000 prize. Deulen will also visit the University of Arkansas campus as the guest of the creative writing and translation program.

Deulen will read from her collection at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 7, in Old Main’s Giffels Auditorium on the University of Arkansas campus. The event is free and open to the public.

Deulen is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Utah. Her book of essays, The Riots, was the winner of the 2010 AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction and is published by the University of Georgia Press.

Stephen Gibson

The finalist for this year’s prize is Stephen Gibson, for his collection Paradise (paperback, $16). Gibson is the author of three previous poetry collections, Frescoes, Masaccio’s Expulsion, and Rorschach Art. He is a past Individual Artist Fellowship recipient from the state of Florida in both poetry and fiction.

The poetry prize is named in honor of Miller Williams, one of America’s finest poets and cofounder and first director of the University of Arkansas Press. Williams was also a director of the university’s nationally recognized creative writing program. As director of the University of Arkansas Press, Williams published the work of many outstanding poets and writers. He was also the official Inaugural Poet at Bill Clinton’s 1997 presidential inauguration, for which he wrote and read “Of Hope and History.”

To honor Williams’ service to the press and his career as an author, the Miller Williams Poetry Prize was established in 2007 and funded by a concert given by Lucinda Williams, a Grammy award-winning musician and Miller Williams’ daughter.