White Pine Press announced today that poet Kelli Russell Agodon has won its fifteenth annual poetry book prize for Letters From the Emily Dickinson Room, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Dennis. The Buffalo-based indie press will publish Agodon's book, her second, next fall, and she will receive one thousand dollars.
Agodon's debut collection, Small Knots, was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2004. Her poems have also appeared in magazines and journals, including Prairie Schooner and the Atlantic, and anthologies such as Poets Against the War (Nation Books, 2003), edited by Sam Hamill. She coedits the Crab Creek Review, a twenty-five-year-old Seattle literary magazine.
The sixteenth annual White Pine Press contest is currently underway, with an entry deadline of November 30. U.S. poets can submit manuscripts of sixty to eighty pages with a twenty-dollar fee. The judge remains anonymous until the competition closes, but the press does say that the poet making the selection will be a writer of national reputation.