Poets & Writers is pleased to announce that Simone Kearney, Eugenia Leigh, and Anne Marie Rooney have won the 15th Annual Amy Awards. The winners will read their work at a public reading at 6 PM on October 20 at the New York Society Library, located at 53 East 79th St. in Manhattan. They will be joined by guest poets Philip Appleman and Simon Perchik.
Simone Kearney received her MFA in poetry from Hunter College, and her work can be found in Elimae, Maggy, Sal Mimeo, and Supermachine. She has worked as an assistant for poets Mark Strand and Grace Schulman, and as an intern for the Swiss artist Olaf Breuning. She is also a visual artist and recently performed at the Toy Theatre Company in a collaborative piece that incorporated her poems and puppetry. She resides in Brooklyn.
Eugenia Leigh is a Korean American poet born in Chicago. She received her MFA in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and has led writing workshops for Brooklyn high school students and for incarcerated youths in Valhalla, NY. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in several journals, including Kartika Review, Inkwell Journal, The Los Angeles Review, Relief Journal, and Best New Poets 2010. Examples of of her work can be found here at her Web site.
Anne Marie Rooney was born and raised in New York City, and holds degrees from Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. She won this year’s Iowa Review Award as well as the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, and received honorable mentions in the Morton Marr Contest and The Atlantic Monthly’s Student Writing Contest. Additionally, her chapbook was short-listed in Bateau Press’s Annual BOOM Competition. Her work can be found in recent issues of Columbia, Narrative, Pleiades, and in 2008’s Best New Poets. Links to her work can be found here at her Web site.
Poets & Writers presents the Amy Award each year to women poets age 30 and under living in the New York City metropolitan area or on Long Island. Winners receive an honorarium and a reading in New York City. The award was established in 1995 by Paula Trachtman and Edward Butscher of East Hampton, New York in memory of Ms. Trachtman’s daughter, Amy Rothholz, an actor and poet.