The PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, established by a bequest from Hunce Voelcker, will be presented for the eighth time in 2008. The award is given to a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work to date represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature. The poet honored by the award is one for whom the exceptional promise seen in earlier work has been fulfilled, and who continues to mature with each successive volume of poetry. The award is given in even-numbered years and carries a stipend of $5,000.

2008 judges: Kwame Dawes, Mark Doty, and Marie Howe

The 2007 PEN Literary Awards will be presented in New York on the evening of Monday, May 19, at the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center. Members of the press are welcome to attend.

For more information contact Literary Awards Coordinator Nick Burd: (212) 334-1660, ext. 108, awards@pen.org

Please click here for more information on this award.

This year's award will go to Kimiko Hahn.

From the judges' citation: “With wild courage Kimiko Hahn’s poems voyage fearlessly into explorations of love, sexuality, motherhood, violence, and grief and the way gender inscribes us.”

Kimiko Hahn is the author seven books of poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; and The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006). Hahn is a recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, including The Shelley Memorial Prize and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers’ Award. She is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA program at Queens College/CUNY.