2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowship Winners Announced

CHICAGO — The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine are pleased to announce the five recipients of the 2010 Ruth Lilly Fellowships: Brooklyn Copeland, Miriam Bird Greenberg, Nate Klug, Dora Malech, and Christopher Shannon. Among the largest awards offered to aspiring poets in the United States, each Lilly Fellowship carries a $15,000 scholarship prize for fellows to use as they wish in continued study and writing of poetry.

The editors of Poetry magazine selected the winning manuscripts from over 1,000 applications. In announcing the winners, Poetry editor Christian Wiman remarked, “The response to this year’s competition was the biggest yet. We are excited to be at the beginning of these talented young poets’ careers, and to give them the support and encouragement they need to take the next step.”

Brooklyn Copeland was born in Indianapolis in 1984, and spent most of her life just north of the city. Copeland has also lived in Florida, England, and Finland, and she currently works as an auditor and a yoga instructor. Limited runs of her chapbooks have appeared with small presses. The most recent, Laked, Fielded, Blanked, is scheduled to appear with Alice Blue Books this winter.

Miriam Bird Greenberg was born in 1980 and grew up in rural Texas. She studied English and studio arts at the University of Pittsburgh, and earned an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers. She is a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.

Nate Klug was born in Minnesota in 1985 and grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He attended Roxbury Latin in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and went on to study English at the University of Chicago. He is currently a Master of Divinity student at Yale Divinity School and is a candidate for ordained ministry in the United Church of Christ. His poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the Christian Century, Literary Imagination, Poetry, Yale Review, and Zoland Poetry Annual.

Dora Malech was born in 1981 and grew up in Maryland. She earned a BA from Yale and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Author of Shore Ordered Ocean (2010) and Say So (forthcoming), her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College of California this fall, her awards include the Civitella Ranieri and Glenn Schaeffer Fellowships.

Christopher Shannon was born in 1981 in Beech Grove, Indiana. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he received a BA in English and creative writing and minored in music. He earned his MFA from the University of Florida. His poems and reviews have appeared in 32 Poems, Denver Quarterly, and Germanic Review. Shannon is the editor of the text-message poetry journal Cellpoems.

These five emerging voices will be featured in Poetry magazine’s November issue, and on www.poetryfoundation.org.

The Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship program is organized and administered by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, publisher of Poetry magazine.

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About the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship Program
Established in 1989 by Ruth Lilly to encourage the further writing and study of poetry, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship program has dramatically expanded since its inception. Until 1995, university writing programs nationwide each nominated one student poet for a single fellowship; from 1996 until 2007, two fellowships were awarded. In 2008 the competition was opened to all U.S. poets between 21 and 31 years of age, and the number of fellowships increased to five, totaling $75,000.

About Poetry
Founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912, Poetry is the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world. Monroe’s “Open Door” policy, set forth in Volume 1 of the magazine, remains the most succinct statement of Poetry’s mission: to print the best poetry written today, in whatever style, genre, or approach. The magazine established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, and other now-classic authors. In succeeding decades it has presented—often for the first time—works by virtually every major contemporary poet.

About the Poetry Foundation
The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is an independent literary organization committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. It exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience. The Poetry Foundation seeks to be a leader in shaping a receptive climate for poetry by developing new audiences, creating new avenues for delivery, and encouraging new kinds of poetry through innovative literary prizes and programs. For more information, please visit www.poetryfoundation.org.

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