Griffin Poetry Prize Poets – Stay in Touch

The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry has the privilege every year of working and being associated with some of the world’s most talented and lively literary figures, both established and up-and-coming. Where does poetry take these vibrant individuals beyond their connections with the Griffin Trust? Check here to find out where previous Griffin Poetry Prize shortlisted poets have travelled and what they’re involved in now.

Several Griffin poets also stay in touch through the Griffin Poets’ Blog. Read the latest updates here.

We are now publishing Griffin Poetry Prize and Griffin poet updates via Twitter. You can see the latest updates in the box to the right, or you can subscribe to our Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/griffinpoetry.

If you are a Griffin Poetry Prize poet and would like to update the information in this section, please click here.

• The late Margaret Avison and her influential work are wonderfully profiled in Canadian Notes & Queries. Her posthumous collection Listening is praised here.

• Ken Babstock’s Airstream Land Yacht continues to garner enthusiastic reviews. Babstock is featured in the first of a series of bimonthly poetry interview podcasts provided by Maisonneuve magazine.

• The late Robin Blaser read at the respected Lunch Poems Noontime Poetry Reading Series at UC Berkeley in November, 2008. A webcast of Blaser's reading, as well as those of other renowned poets who have taken part of the series, can be found on the Lunch Poems Web site. The video of Blaser's reading has also been posted to YouTube:

• Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld were pleased to see their translation of Yehuda Amichai’s Open Closed Open (shortlisted for the 2001 International Griffin Poetry Prize) issued in trade paperback in the fall of 2006. In March, 2007, composer David Del Tredici presented a new solo piano work entitled “Chana's Story”, a cycle on texts by Chana Bloch, which is described here and here. Chana Bloch is a contributing editor to Persimmon Tree, which celebrates artists and writers over 60. Bloch and Kronfeld’s latest collaboration is the translated work Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch, published in April 2009.

• Christian Bök is enjoying a resurgence of interest in Eunoia, which won the 2002 Griffin Poetry Prize. Within two days of Bök being interviewed on a BBC radio show at the end of October, 2008, the entire print run of the new UK edition of his volume had sold out. The book, which reached No. 8 on Amazon UK, is now in its third UK printing, and it also made the Times of London's list of 2008’s Top 10 books. Read all about it here and here. Bök was recently interviewed at length on the subject of Canadian literary awards, and provided many absorbing opinions and insights, which are detailed here.

• Roo Borson recently took part in Writers' Week, part of the 2010 Adelaide Festival in Australia. A selection from her Griffin Poetry Prize winning book Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida will be broadcast on ABC Radio in April, 2010.

• George Bowering served as a judge for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize. His latest volume of poetry, Vermeer’s Light, was longlisted for the ReLit Award. Bowering’s essay “Human Intellect and the Divine” was featured on the NPR and CBC Radio program This I Believe.

• Di Brandt’s collection of creative essays So this is the world & here I am in it was nominated for the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, part of the 2008 Manitoba Book Awards. Brandt recently contributed to a new one-woman opera exploring the life and work of Canadian artist Emily Carr.

• Dionne Brand’s latest volume of poetry, Inventory, was released in spring, 2006, and was nominated for the 2006 Governor General's Award for poetry, and also shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Award and the Trillium Book Award. Brand was one of the judges for the 2008 John Kenneth Galbraith Literary Award, which is awarded for an individual short story.

• Kamau Brathwaite was the sole Musgrave Gold medallist recognized by the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ) in 2006. In January, 2007, Brathwaite was awarded the top prize in the Frank Collymore Literary Endowment competition, garnering $10,000 (Barbados) for Missa Solemnis, a collection of poems shaped in part by the Beethoven composition of the same name. Brathwaite's new collection of stories, DS (2): Dreamstories, is reviewed here.

• Robert Bringhurst’s most recent work, Everywhere Being is Dancing: Twenty Pieces of Thinking, is reviewed here. It is a companion volume to The Tree of Meaning: Thirteen Talks, and both contemplate the connections between poetry, language, nature and philosophy. It won the BC Book Prize Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize for 2008.

• Anne Carson was the 2008 Lillian Vernon Distinguished Writer-in-Residence in the New York University Creative Writing program. Carson was named a member of the Order of Canada in August, 2005. Carson is a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Victor Hernández Cruz was recently named a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, the first Latino to hold the post since the Board of Chancellors was established in 1946. Cruz’s most recent collection, The Mountain in the Sea, is described here, and he is interviewed here.

• Elaine Equi and her partner and fellow poet Jerome Sala gave a lively reading from their respective works at Rust Belt Books in Buffalo in November, 2008.

• Clayton Eshleman was interviewed in May, 2008 on the KCRW Bookworm NPR radio program. Listen to and download the audio segment here.

• Paul Farley was the well-received keynote speaker for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize awards ceremony. Read his speech here. Farley took part in the inaugural Chapter & Verse Literature Festival in Liverpool in September, 2008.

• Leslie Greentree’s first book of short stories was published by the University of Alberta Press in spring 2006. A Minor Planet for You is a collection of short fiction about relationships, quirky and real, that everyone can relate to. Learn more about it here and read a review of it here. In the fall of 2006, Greentree won in the short story category for the CBC Alberta Anthology, with a piece entitled The Brilliant Save.

• Durs Grünbein’s work is examined in tandem with that of Paul Celan and Joseph Brodsky in Poetic Affairs by Michael Eskin, published in 2008. Grünbein is involved in German filmmaker Alexander Kluge's project to create a 420-minute film version of Karl Marx's Das Kapital.

• Phil Hall has contributed three new poems to the Griffin Poets' Blog – click here to enjoy them. In 2008, Hall was profiled on poetics.ca.

• David Harsent received a Cholmondeley Award in June, 2008. The Cholmondeley Awards for Poets were founded by the late Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley in 1966 to recognise the achievement and distinction of individual poets. They are honorary awards for which submissions are not accepted. Harsent is also collaborating again with composer Harrison Birtwistle on a new chamber music piece entitled The Corridor.

• Michael Hofmann recently translated Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada - it is reviewed here. Hofmann's translation of Franz Kafka's Amerika: The Missing Person is reviewed here.

• Fanny Howe was announced as the winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement in April, 2009. Learn more about it here. Howe's most recent work is A Wall of Two, the translation into English of the poems of Buchenwald survivors Ilona and Henia Karmel. Read more about the book here.

• Kathleen Jamie’s collection of poetry, The Tree House (Picador), garnered extensive acclaim. The book won the esteemed £10,000 Forward Prize and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Most recently, Jamie became the first poet to win Scotland’s most valuable literary prize – the £10,000 Scottish Book of the Year Award. In early 2006, Jamie’s poem “The Blue Boat” was one of four English poems translated into Chinese and displayed throughout the Shanghai subway system, in part of an exchange with the United Kingdom that will see four Chinese poems translated into English and displayed throughout the London subway system. Also in 2006, Jamie wrote some specially commissioned poems to accompany Anatomy Acts: How We Come to Know Ourselves, an acclaimed exhibition that explored the social, cultural and scientific significance of anatomy. Later in 2006, she was interviewed by The Scotsman. Jamie is featured as part of an enhanced presence for Scottish poets in The Poetry Archive – her profile and selections from her work are found here. Jamie is a judge for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Suji Kwock Kim teaches full time at Drew University, but just added a second job teaching half-time at Sarah Lawrence College. She is finishing her second book of poems, co-translating an anthology of Korean poetry, and editing the Penguin Anthology of Asian American Literature, the first major anthology of Asian American literature in over a decade. She read at several universities and festivals recently including the 2004 National Book Festival/ Library of Congress, the 2004 Geraldine Dodge Festival, the 2005 United Nations “Community Commons” event, and the 2005 University of California at Berkeley “Lunch Poem Series” (curated by Griffin Trustee Robert Hass).
  
  

  Kim's poems have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Spanish (for the anthology Lineas Conectadas: Nueva Poesia de los Estados Unidos, in association with the U.S. Embassy in Mexico), and German (for Berliner Anthologie, in association with Internationales Literaturfestival Berlin). Her poems are being set to music by the Mayako Kubo and the Tokyo Philharmonic Chorus, with premieres in Berlin and Tokyo scheduled for 2007. In 2006, Suji Kwock Kim was slated to complete a residency at The Hall Farm Center for Arts & Education in Vermont. In late 2006, she was the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award.

• David Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems, is reviewed here, here and here, was shortlisted for the National Book Award and won the Florida Book Award for poetry.

• August Kleinzahler was interviewed in the Fall, 2007 issue of The Paris Review. Read an excerpt of the interview here. His most recent volume of poetry, Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, reviewed here, came out in paperback in April, 2009. Kleinzahler shared the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 2008 with Juan Felipe Herrera. Kleinzahler was most recently profiled in a lively piece in The Guardian.

• Sylvia Legris’ and Christian Bök’s poems are part of an eclectic collection (including works by Charles Bukowski, e.e. cummings and Maya Angelou) that have been recently translated into Icelandic. Legris was appointed editor of Saskatchewan’s Grain Magazine in October, 2008.

• Christopher Logue was honoured by the Queen in 2007 with a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services to literature. In addition to his acclaimed poetry, Logue has written for the theatre and cinema, and once penned a pornographic novel under the pseudonym Count Palmiro Vicarion.

• Heather McHugh was one of 50 recipients of a $50,000 (US) United States Artists grant, described here, in December, 2006. In the summer of 2007, McHugh received one of the $5,000 (US) Genius Awards from Seattle-based alternative newspaper The Stranger, as described here. In spring 2008, she read at the University of Rochester as part of the Caroline Werner Gannett Lecture Series.

• David McFadden’s Why Are You So Sad? is longlisted for the ReLit Award. He is next reading at the Scream Literary Festival in July, 2008.

• Don McKay was appointed as a Member of the Order of Canada in December, 2008, for his contributions to Canadian literature as a nature poet and mentor of many emerging writers from coast to coast. In 2008, McKay released an audio CD entitled “Songs for the Songs of Birds”, through Rattling Books. The CD celebrates the way birds “articulate the air” and considers what the world would be without them. His award-winning volume Strike/Slip continues to garner wonderful reviews. McKay's latest volume of poetry, The Muskwa Assemblage, was inspired by an “art camp” expedition to the Muskwa-Kechika wilderness of Northern British Columbia. Read more about it here.

• Dunya Mikhail was interviewed on National Public Radio (NPR) in July, 2007. Listen to the interview and selected readings here. Earlier in 2007, Mikhail took part in the University of California at Berkeley's Lunch Poems series, and a video of her reading is available here on YouTube.

• A.F. Moritz will travel to Shanghai September, 2010 and present his poetry as part of Canada's cultural program at Expo 2010. The cultural programming is under the aegis of Cirque du Soleil and Blue Metropolis, a Montreal literary organization. In the last weeks of December, 2009, the Globe and Mail named Moritz’s The Sentinel (2008) in its “100 best books of 2009” feature, and his Night Street Repairs (2004), along with The Sentinel, in an article selecting 39 “books of the decade”.

• Erin Moure characterized poetry as an extreme sport in a recent lively interview.

• Paul Muldoon’s awards, achievements and activities are regularly detailed on the News page of his official Web site. In 2006, businessman Leonard L Milberg donated a rare collection of Irish theatre works to Princeton University as a tribute to Muldoon. In September, 2007, it was announced that Muldoon would take over as poetry editor for the New Yorker. In April 2008, Muldoon was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Amidst it all, Muldoon continues to front his Princeton-based rock band Rackett.

• Les Murray's latest book, Bi-Plane Houses, was published in the spring of 2006, wass shortlisted for Australia’s The Age Book of the Year, and is reviewed here, here and here. He shared his thoughts and reflections in an interesting interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in mid-2006. His work is examined from a medieval perspective in this interesting article published in The Australian in the spring of 2007.

• Alice Notley’s newest volume, Alma, or The Dead Women, is reviewed here. She read at the University of Pennsylvania in November, 2006. She was recently interviewed in Toronto’s Eye Weekly.

• P.K. Page died in January, 2010 at the age of 93. Many heartfelt tributes to her and her extensive body of work have been published, including this retrospective from CBC Arts. Page remained very active in arts and publishing throughout her life. She was paid special tribute by the Victoria Symphony on the occasion of her 90th birthday in September, 2006 with a special celebration, described here. The Malahat Review recently announced a new P. K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry, which will recognize the excellence of the publication's contributors by awarding a prize of $1000 to the author of the best poem or sequence of poems to have appeared in the magazine’s quarterly issues during the previous calendar year. One of Page's most recent works, a short fiction piece entitled Up on the Roof, was released in spring, 2007, is reviewed here and was longlisted for the ReLit Award in the short fiction category. She reflected on her work and other issues in this December, 2006 interview.

  P.K. Page’s last collection, Coal and Roses, is shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Michael Palmer was the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Learn more about it here. When Palmer read at the Lunch Poems Noontime Poetry Reading Series at UC Berkeley, it was captured in this 30-minute YouTube video.

• Michael Symmons Roberts read at the Manchester Metropolitan University Writing School in February, 2009.

• Matthew Rohrer took part in some of the stops in the Poetry Bus Tour 2006, described in this lively article. Rohrer’s new volume of poetry, Rise Up, was released in spring, 2007, is described here and is reviewed here. Rohrer welcomed celebrants to the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize awards gala with an entertaining and provocative speech.

• Frederick Seidel was profiled in the New York Times Magazine in April, 2009 - read it here.

• Charles Simic was the 2007 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. On the same day in August, 2007 that Simic received this award, the US Library of Congress announced that he had been chosen as the new US Poet Laureate. He retired from the Poet Laureate post in 2008 to return to writing poetry, as he discusses here.

  

• Anne Simpson appeared in an episode of the second season of Heart of a Poet, a documentary “television series in which each episode profiles the life, inspiration and performances of a working Canadian poet. Read more about it on the program’s Web site. (Christian Bök and Karen Solie appeared in episodes in the inaugural season of this series in 2006.) Simpson’s new volume of poetry, Quick, reviewed here, recently won the 2008 Pat Lowther Award. Read more about it here. Simpson’s new novel, Falling, is reviewed here and here.

• Louis Simpson’s work appears in the new volume Second World War Poems (Faber), which is reviewed here. Simpson was also interviewed for the upcoming book Our Fathers’ War: Growing Up in the Shadow of the Greatest Generation, described here. In March 2006, Simpson took part in a rare literary reunion of alumni contributors to the famed Columbia Review, described here.

• Karen Solie’s newest collection, Pigeon, was published in April, 2009 and is shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize.

• Gerald Stern was the 2005 recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award, given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Read more about the honour here. Stern will contribute new poems to a discussion series entitled A Question of Impeachment in the fall of 2007. Read more about it here.

• Priscila Uppal’s new novel, To Whom It May Concern, was released in January, 2009. She was recently interviewed about it and other interests in the Toronto Star.

• C.D. Wright’s latest collection, Rising, Falling, Hovering is reviewed here.

• Charles Wright has been awarded the lifetime achievement Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for 2008, described here.