Professor wins AWP award for poetry

Joan Kane, adjunct faculty in the English Department, recently won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry for her collection Hyperboreal. Part of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Award Series, an annual competition for the publication of excellent new book-length works, the Donald Hall Prize offers an award of $5,500, supported by Amazon.com, and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press.

Arthur Sze, judge for the competition, said of Hyperboreal, "'Arnica nods heavy-headed on the bruised slope.' In these vivid, disturbing, and mysterious poems, written in English and Inupiaq, Joan Kane writes out of the landscape and language of the far north. Hyperboreal is situated at a threshold between cultures, between inner and outer worlds, and the poems are voiced with a 'knife blade at the throat's slight swell.' Her compelling vision is earned through a language that will dislocate in order to relocate and whose tonal shifts are exact and exacting."

Pamela Kearney, UAA M.F.A. graduate, also took second place in the AWP Award Series for the Novel with her work "The Sunflower Wife."