The Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, which nurtured the careers of more than two dozen poets since the first award was given in 1983 (when judge Anthony Hecht chose Susan Donnelly's Eve Names the Animals), has been suspended. "There's little to say," replied series editor Guy Rotella when asked for details. "The economics no longer work."
The annual prize, sponsored by Northeastern University in Boston, offered a thousand dollars and publication by Northeasterm University Press with distribution through the University Press of New England, for a first or second book of poems.
The most recent winner is Lisa Gluskin, whose collection Tulips, Water, Ash was selected by judge Jean Valentine earlier this year. The book is scheduled to be published in September. Previous winners include Carl Phillips (In the Blood, 1992), Allison Funk (Living at the Epicenter, 1995), Jennifer Atkinson (The Drowned City, 2000), Ted Genoways (Bullroarer, 2001), and Roy Jacobstein (A Form of Optimism, 2006). Past judges included Maxine Kumin, X.J. Kennedy, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Peter Davison, Charles Simic, Rachel Hadas, A. R. Ammons, David Ferry, Sonia Sanchez, Molly Peacock, Edward Hirsch, Carolyn Kizer, Alfred Corn, Marilyn Hacker, Rosanna Warren, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Eric Pankey, Lucia Perillo, Charles Harper Webb, and Rodney Jones.
For the first twenty-one years of the award, the winning books retained the series' signature design. Below are a few of the covers from the earlier period, Genoways's Bullroarer, Robert Cording's The Actual Moon, the Actual Stars, and Dana Roeser's Beautiful Motion, followed by the most recently published—and, as it turns out, repeat—winner, Roeser's In the Truth Room.
