George David Clark Is Winner of Miller Williams Poetry Prize

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – George David Clark has been named the winner of the 2015 Miller Williams Poetry Prize from the University of Arkansas Press.

Clark’s manuscript, titled Reveille, was chosen by series editor Enid Shomer from among hundreds of entrants for the annual prize, which provides a $5,000 cash award in addition to publication by the press through the Miller Williams Poetry Series.

Clark described his work as appropriate for any reader of contemporary poetry, but particularly for readers of Southern poetry, readers interested in the intersection of poetry and theology and readers attracted to formal invention in lyric verse.

Clark teaches poetry at Valparaiso University. A former Lilly Postdoctoral Fellow, he has also held the O'Connor Fellowship at Colgate University. His poems have appeared in the Believer, Shenandoah, and the Yale Review and have won awards from Narrative, Pleiades and Southern Poetry Review.

Poet Lisa Russ Spaar described the poems in Reveille as “at once unabashedly, tenderly secular and lavishly sacred, creating out of all manner of cris de coeur (echoes, rumors, stutters, a son’s colicky wailing, a Biblical bout of coughing) a sensuous, ecstatic, formally brilliant music.”

The Miller Williams Poetry Series has its roots in the Arkansas Poetry Prize that was first awarded in 1990. Shomer became the editor in 2002 and in 2009, the press began to offer the $5,000 prize — one of the largest of its kind in the country. A concert by Lucinda Williams, the Grammy-award-winning daughter of Miller Williams, established funding for the prize. Under Shomer’s leadership, the series published almost 50 books and garnered several awards, including the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, and the Library of Virginia Poetry Award.

The press accepts submissions year round, with the submission period ending on September 30. As many as four manuscripts — the winner and up to three finalists — are selected for publication.

In the spring of this year, the press announced that Billy Collins had been named the editor of the series starting with the 2016 prize, which is currently accepting submissions. Collins, a two-time U.S. Poet Laureate and author of 11 books of poetry, had his first book of poetry, The Apple That Astonished Paris, published by the press in 1988, under the directorship of Williams. Apple remains one of the press’s best-selling books.

As editor, Collins will be ultimately responsible for the books published through the series and for choosing the winner of the annual prize.

The University of Arkansas Press, founded in 1980, is an academic publishing house that is part of the University of Arkansas. A member of the Association of American University Presses, it has as its central and continuing mission the publication of books that serve both the broader academic community and Arkansas and the region.