Poets & Writers Announces 2008 Amy Award Winners

New York, NY -- Poets & Writers is pleased to announce that Idra Novey, Leigh Stein, and Annabelle Moseley are the first, second, and third place winners of the 2008 Amy Award. The three winners will read their work at a public reading at 6 p.m. on October 22 at New York Society Library, located at 53 East 79^th St. in Manhattan.

Idra Novey’s poems have appeared in AGNI, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Slate. Her first book of poems, The Next Country, received the 2007 Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books and will be released in November. A chapbook of her work was selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2005 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. She currently teaches in the creative writing program at Columbia University and in the Bard College Prison Initiative.

Leigh Stein is the winner of the 2007 Transcontinental Poetry Prize, and author of the chapbook How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance (Dancing Girl Press, June 2008). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bat City Review, Barrow Street, Diagram, h-ngm-n, and No Tell Motel. Originally from Chicago, she now lives in Brooklyn and works for a comic book publisher.

Annabelle Moseley’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in several journals, including Oberon, Seventh Quarray, Soundings East, and the Texas Review. She served for three years as Poet-in-Residence at the Stevenson Academy of Fine Arts in Oyster Bay, New York. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Fairfield University.

The Amy Award is presented 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.

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