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PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award
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The PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry of $5,000 is given in odd-numbered years and recognizes the high literary character of the published work to date of a new and emerging American poet of any age and the promise of further literary achievement. Past winners have been Nick Flynn, Richard Matthews, Dana Levin, and Yerra Sugarman.
2007 judges: April Bernard, Elaine Equi, and John Yau
The 2007 PEN Literary Awards will presented in New York on the evening
of Monday, May 21 at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center.
For more information contact Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, nick@pen.org
Please click here for more information on this award.
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2007 Awardee
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This year’s PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award will go to Peter Covino, author of the poetry collection, Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2005), published by New Issues, and a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Thom Gunn Award.
Covino
was born in Italy and educated there and in the United States, where he
earned an M.S. degree from Columbia School of Social Work. He received
his Ph.D. in English/Creative Writing at the University of Utah where
he was a Steffensen Cannon Fellow. Covino is also the author of
Straight Boyfriend, winner of the 2001 Frank O'Hara Chapbook Prize. His
poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Columbia, The Journal, The Paris Review, Verse, and The Penguin Book of Italian American Writing. Currently, he is completing a translation project of Italian poets for an anthology on Contemporary European Poets,
Graywolf Press 2007. Covino is also one of the founding editors of the
literary press, Barrow Street Inc, and Barrow Street Books (established
1998). He teaches at the University of Rhode Island.
From the
judges’ citation: “Images of real and symbolic violence ricochet and
reflect off each other in this elegant and disturbing collection. The
poems chronicle, among other things, a history of childhood abuse and
its after effects, but in a larger sense, they also explore through the
lens of myth, art, religion, and popular culture, the underlying and
often unacknowledged brutality beneath even mundane events. Covino's
voice is urgent: ‘This is my last dollar, last cigarette, last match,’
but it is also witty, sophisticated, erudite, and street-wise. How can
we not pay attention?”
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