TORONTO – September 25, 2013 – The trustees of The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry are pleased to announce that Robert Bringhurst (Canada), Jo Shapcott (UK), and C.D. Wright (US) are the judges for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Robert Bringhurst has published some twenty books of poetry. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry and has held research grants in Native American literature and linguistics from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (Paris), and the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. He held the Atwood-Roy chair in Canadian Literature at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 2008. In 2010 he served as Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Wyoming and in 2011 as Witter Bynner fellow in poetry at the Library of Congress. In 2013 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.
Jo Shapcott was born in London, England. Poems from her three award-winning collections, Electroplating the Baby (1988), Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998) are gathered in a selected poems, Her Book (2000). She has won a number of literary prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Collection, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the National Poetry Competition (twice). Tender Taxes, her versions of Rilke, was published in 2001. Her most recent collection, Of Mutability, was published in 2010 and won the Costa Book Award. In 2011 Jo Shapcott was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
C.D. Wright is the author of more than a dozen books, most recently, One With Others: a little book of her days which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lenore Marshall Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A limited edition of her long poem Breathtaken with linocuts by Walter Feldman was published by Ziggurat in 2012. Her book Rising, Falling, Hovering won the 2009 International Griffin Poetry Prize. With photographer Deborah Luster she published One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana that won the Lange-Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. On a fellowship for writers from the Wallace Foundation she curated a “Walk-in Book of Arkansas,” a multi-media exhibition that toured throughout her native state. She teaches at Brown University and lives outside of Providence, Rhode Island.
All three judges understand the importance of the Griffin Poetry Prize’s international reach and may consequently call in books of English language poetry from around the world.
The shortlisted books (four International and three Canadian) will be announced on Tuesday, April 8, 2014 at a press conference in Toronto, Canada.
The Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry is pleased to announce that the Shortlist Readings will take place in Koerner Hall at The Royal Conservatory in the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, on Wednesday, June 4, 2014.
The winners of the Griffin Poetry Prize will be named at an awards ceremony to be held in Toronto on Thursday, June 5, 2014.
Note to Publishers:
The submissions deadline for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize, for books published between January 1 and December 31, 2013, is Tuesday, December 31, 2013. Submitted books must be postmarked no later than this date.
If you have any questions regarding the rules, or would like to download an entry form, please visit our Web site, at: /how-to-enter/rules.
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For further information, please contact:
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June Dickenson
Email: press@griffinpoetryprize.com
Tel: 647 477 6000
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Ruth Smith, Manager
Email: info@griffinpoetryprize.com
Tel: 905 618 0420