Noah Warren of New Orleans has won the 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for his debut poetry collection, The Destroyer in the Glass. He will receive a fellowship at the James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut, and his collection will be published by Yale University Press in April 2016. The annual prize is given for a debut poetry collection by a poet under the age of 40.
Carl Phillips, the series judge since 2011, chose Warren’s manuscript from over five hundred entries. “The Destroyer in the Glass impresses at once with its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self,” says Phillips. “The poems both examine and embody the nexus of joy and sorrow, of certainty and confusion, without which there’d be none of the restlessness that makes us uniquely human.”
Warren, who was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, graduated from Yale University in 2011. He is the recipient of Yale University’s Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship, and has published work in AGNI, Poetry, the Southern Review, and the Yale Review.
Warren is the 110th winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, which is the oldest poetry prize in the United States. Past winners include John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, Robert Hass, Adrienne Rich, and Jean Valentine. Ansel Elkins won in 2014 for her collection, Blue Yodel, forthcoming from Yale University Press in March.
Photo: Noah Warren, Credit: Ana Flores