University of Arkansas Press Announces 2012 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize Winner

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Catherine MacDonald

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. Catherine MacDonald has won the 2012 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, a $5,000 annual award given by the University of Arkansas Press. Her collection, Rousing the Machinery, will be published by the press in the spring of 2012.

Rousing the Machinery, which is MacDonald's debut collection, describes the "untidy geographies" of inheritance and loss, familial fracture and cohesion. Through precise and evocative imagery rooted in both the natural and domestic spheres, these poems detail the passages of an ordinary life — motherhood, a parent's long illness, the ambiguities of marriage, a brother's imprisonment. Rousing the Machinery invokes the music of everyday speech to shape an accessible poetry concerned with our human difficulties and desires.

MacDonald lives in Richmond, Va., and teaches writing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her poems and criticism have been published in the Crab Orchard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Blackbird, Louisville Review, and other journals.

Three finalists for the Williams Prize were also named. Adam Vines' collection The Coal Life will be published by the University of Arkansas press in Spring 2012. Robert Gibb's collection The Empty Loom and Annette Spaulding-Convy's collection In Broken Latin will be published by the press in the fall of 2012.

Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he edits Birmingham Poetry Review. Many of the poems in The Coal Life explore the cultural landscape of Alabama coal mining camps in the first half of the 20th century and how the coal mining industry can shape and distort a cultural text similar to the way it contorts and upturns the physical landscape.

Robert Gibb has lived in the steel town of Homestead, Pa., all his life. He is the author of eight books of poetry. He is a National Poetry Series Winner, and he has won the Camden Poetry Award, two Poetry Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, seven Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants, the Wildwood Poetry Prize, and the Devil's Millhopper Chapbook Prize. The Empty Loom was written for the poet's wife. In the book's central image -loom - the patterns gather, weaving together strands now joyful, now elegiac in tone. Gibb's love and its loss are resplendently rendered in poems that shift like the sun as it tracks across a room, a life.

Annette Spaulding-Convy lives in Puget Sound and is currently co-editor of the literary journal Crab Creek Review, and the co-founder of Two Sylvias Press. In Broken Latin explores in a series of deft, witty, sexy and soulful poems the misunderstood, idealized and marginalized life of a modern Roman Catholic nun. In these poems, set in the patriarchal institution of the convent, Spaulding-Convy comments on the American woman's struggle for spiritual identity in contemporary culture.

The University of Arkansas Press has been publishing poetry ever since Miller Williams became the press’s first director 30 years ago. In 2007, a benefit concert by his daughter, Lucinda Williams, made the endowment of a $5,000 annual award possible. The inaugural winner was Michael Walsh, for his collection The Dirt Riddles, published in spring 2010. Noted poet Paul Zimmer said about Walsh's book: "What a way to initiate the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, a series honoring one of our best American poets, by introducing an important new talent." In spring 2011 the press published the second winner, Lovely Asunder by Danielle Cadena Deulen.

The University of Arkansas Press will be accepting submissions in September and October for the 2013 Prize. For more information, visit uapress.com.