Some news I've been sitting on for a little while has become public knowledge
with the issuance of a Press Release earlier today: Vievee Francis has been awarded the 2010 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize. Her collection of poems, Horse in the Dark, will be published by the University's Press in March 2011.
I loved Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press), her debut collection, and believe I've had the opportunity to hear Vievee read from some of the poems that will be included in Horse in the Dark, and they've been stellar works. Mark your calendars!
The following is the full PR as issued:
Northwestern University Press to Publish Horse in the Dark
BROOKLYN, NY (July 15, 2010) — Cave Canem Foundation, Inc., North America’s premier “home for Black Poetry,” is pleased to announce that Vievee Francis has received the 2010 Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize for her manuscript, Horse in the Dark, selected by Parneshia Jones and Adrian Matejka. Northwestern University Press will publish the collection in March 2011. Combining the efforts of the two organizations to celebrate and publish works of lasting cultural value and literary excellence, the prize is a second‐book award for African American poets. Adrian Matejka writes, “The poems in Vievee Francis’s Horse in the Dark are revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history. Her poems remind [us] that geography is fluid and camouflaged by our own memories, memories that are often anthropomorphized by the mechanisms of race and place. And when the poems lean sideways to whisper something necessary, or rise up to tell another kind of truth, history is distilled like moonshine, each moment perfect and dangerous.”
Vievee Francis is the author of Blue‐Tail Fly, a collection of poems published by Wayne State University Press in 2006. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals, anthologies and textbooks, including Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Approaching Literature: Reading Writing and Thinking, Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She earned her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was the 2009/2010 Poet in Residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholar’s Program. She is the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award, a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and Callaloo and Cave Canem fellowships.
Founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the under‐representation of African American poets in writing workshops and MFA programs, Cave Canem is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets. Cave Canem has grown from an initial gathering of 26 poets to become an influential movement with a renowned faculty and a high‐achieving national fellowship of over 300. Its programs include an annual week‐long retreat, first and second book prizes, Legacy Conversations, Poets on Craft talks, writing workshops, publications and national readings. Such world‐class poets as Elizabeth Alexander, Lucille Clifton and Yusef Komunyakaa number among the organization’s faculty and judges. To date, the organization has published Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (The University of Georgia Press, 2007). For more information, visit cavecanempoets.org.
Since its inception in 1893, Northwestern University Press has been at the forefront in publishing important works of scholarship, as well as quality works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and literary criticism. Created in 1992, the TriQuarterly Books imprint is devoted primarily to contemporary American fiction and poetry. In 2010, the Press established the Curbstone Press imprint, which is committed to publishing creative literature that promotes human rights and inter‐cultural understanding. For more information, go to www.nupress.northwestern.edu.
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