Today the University of Pittsburgh Press named Bobby C. Rogers the winner of the 2009 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Paper Anniversary, selected by Pitt Poetry Series editor Ed Ochester, will be published by the press next fall. Rogers will receive a prize of five thousand dollars as well as a standard royalty contract.
According to Pitt's press release, Rogers cites his influences as ranging from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson to the prose of writers such as Flannery O'Connor and John Cheever, as well as "the book of Ecclesiastes and the epistle of James" and the voices of the community in his native Tennessee. The forty-five-year-old writer lives in Memphis and teaches at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.
Given since 1981, the annual Starrett Prize presents the only opportunity for first book manuscripts to be considered for publication by the press. The press reports that in 2009 it received more than seven hundred contest entries, which are accepted each year during the months of March and April.
The past years' winners are:
2008 Cheryl Dumesnil for In Praise of Falling
2007 Michael McGriff for Dismantling the Hills
2006 Nancy Krygowski for Velocity
2005 Rick Hilles for Brother Salvage: Poems
2004 Aaron Smith for Blue on Blue Ground
2003 David Shumate for High Water Mark
2002 Shao Wei for Pulling a Dragon's Teeth
2001 Gabriel Gudding for A Defense of Poetry
2000 Quan Barry for Asylum
1999 Daisy Fried for She Didn't Mean To Do It
1998 Shara McCallum for The Water Between Us
1997 Richard Blanco for City of a Hundred Fires
1996 Helen Conkling for Red Peony Night
1995 Sandy Solomon for Pears, Lake, Sun
1994 Jan Beatty for Mad River
1993 Natasha Sajé for Red Under the Skin
1992 Hunt Hawkins for The Domestic Life
1991 Julia Kasdorf for Sleeping Preacher
1990 Debra Allbery for Walking Distance
1989 Nancy Vieira Couto for The Face in the Water
1988 Maxine Scates for Toluca Street
1987 David Rivard for Torque
1986 Robley Wilson for Kingdoms of the Ordinary
1985 Liz Rosenberg for The Fire Music
1984 Arthur Smith for Elegy on Independence Day
1983 Kate Daniels for The White Wave
1982 Lawrence Joseph for Shouting at No One
1981 Kathy Calloway for Heart of the Garfish