2009 APR/Honickman First Book Prize Winner Announced

Laura McKee of Seattle, WA has won the 2009 prize for her manuscript, Uttermost Paradise Place. Selected by creative writer, poet, poetry critic, and current poetry professor, Claudia Keelan, the book is scheduled for a September 2009 release.

As judge Claudia Keelan writes in her introduction, "Laura McKee creates a poetics of call and response, but not in the traditional sense, as in poet to reader, chorus leader to singers, etc. These poems call to each other, syllable by syllable, and they are so pleased with their circuitry of sound and sense that readers—if they just give themselves away to the pleasure of being exactly nowhere but in the unscripted place all authentic poetry provides—will experience the paradise the book proposes."

Laura McKee earned her MFA from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle and works at Cornish College of the Arts.

Image: Laura McKee: Uttermost Paradise Place
Recipient of the 2009 APR/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry Award


2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize Winner Matthew Dickman's manuscript All American Poem, was selected by critically acclaimed poet,Tony Hoagland. Mr. Dickman's poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including The New Yorker, Tin House and Lyric. He has been honored with writing fellowships from the Michener Center, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

All American Poem examines the euphoric nature of our daily lives. In these loosely constructed poems, pop culture and the sacred exist together and at times, are connected with each other. As Matthew Dickman said in an interview, he wants the "people from the community that I come from"—a blue-collar neighborhood in Portland, Oregon—to get his poems. "Also, I decided to include anything I wanted in my poems. . . . Pepsi, McDonald's, the word 'ass.'"

When not attending a writer's residency, Matthew works in a bakery, where he can "shape five baguettes in under three minutes."

"Matthew Dickman's all-American poems are the epitome of the pleasure principle; as clever as they are, they refuse to have ulterior intellectual pretensions; really, I think, they are spiritual in character-free and easy and unself-conscious, lusty, full of sensuous aspiration. . . . We turn loose such poets into our culture so that they can provoke the rest of us into saying everything on our minds."

-- Tony Hoagland, APR/Honickman First Book Prize judge

Image: Matthew Dickman: All American Poem
Recipient of the 2008 APR/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry Award


About the First Book Prize in Poetry
Recognized today as a prestigious and unique award, the annual American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry offers publication of a book of poems, a $3,000 award, and distribution by Copper Canyon Press through Consortium. Each year a distinguished poet is chosen as a judge to select the winner and write the introduction to the winning book. The purpose of the prize is to encourage excellence in poetry, and to provide a wide readership for a deserving first book of poems.

The Honickman Foundation (THF) recognizes that poetry is a powerful medium, albeit an under-served area of the arts, where most poets subsidize their craft through teaching positions at the college level. In addition, it is very difficult in today's publishing climate to get a first book of poetry produced. THF has partnered with The American Poetry Review (APR) in order to fill a void in the field of poetry.

The American Poetry Review is recognized nationally as the preeminent poetry publication and the most highly circulated poetry magazine in the world. Working together, APR and THF are a force within the poetry community, as evidenced by the poets' careers that have already changed as a result of this prestigious award.

Note: The deadline for the 2010 prize is October 31, 2009. Manuscripts must be postmarked between August 1 and October 31, 2009.

Previous Recipients of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize:


Gregory Pardlo's manuscript, Totem was selected by esteemed poet Brenda Hillman for the 2007 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Within the poetry community, there are high hopes for Mr. Pardlo and with good reason: his accomplishments to date have been extraordinary for a poet who has yet to publish a first book.

Some of Gregory Pardlo's honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in poetry and a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as fellowships from The New York Times, the MacDowell Colony, the Seaside Insittute, and Cave Canem. His poems, reviews and translations have appeared in Calalloo, Lyric, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Seneca Review, Volt, Black Issues Book Review and on National Public Radio. He teaches creative writing at Medgar Evers College, CUNY. The publication date for Totem is scheduled for September 2007.


David Roderick, winner of the 2006 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, has published poems in several journals, including The Hudson Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, TriQuarterly, and The Virginia Quarterly Review. He earned an M.F.A. at the University of Massachusetts and spent two years as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. A native of Plymouth, Massachusetts, he is currently the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Blue Colonial was chosen by Robert Pinsky, the 1997 United States Poet Laureate. In his introduction to the book, Pinsky writes, "Here is a poet's true evocation of time, of the fact that we all are destined to live in the puzzling, enticing tragi-comedy of our cultural and personal origins. David Roderick has imagined that destiny in a memorable new way."

"In Blue Colonial, David Roderick's astonishingly accomplished collection of poems, Roderick continually 'roams(s) the periphery' in search of something new. What he finds there by way of salvage, excavation, renovation, and restoration is a 'new language to weigh each item' of his recoveries. And what he demonstrates in a steady and equable fashion is the over-arching lesson of art and life: 'the harder something was, the better chance… of finding it.' I'm grateful for what Roderick's roaming has produced, these poems that bring the periphery of American history, collective and personal, into sharp, material focus. In doing this Blue Colonial provides a fresh entrance into the future of American poetry."
-- Michael Collier


Geoff Bouvier won the 2005 First Book Prize Winner Living Room. He holds degrees from the University of Connecticut and from Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts. His chapbook, Everybody Had a Hat, won the White Eagle Coffee Store Press Poetry Contest for 2000. He lives in San Diego, where he waits tables at Tapenade Restaurant, and publishes journalistic prose with The San Diego Reader.

“The narrating voice in Living Room is insistent but quiet, though it sometimes achieves loudness without any apparent effort. At other times it seems to continue in the reader's mind even after stopping for the day. It is an important new presence, faintly disturbing and endlessly attractive.”
-- John Ashbery


Kevin Ducey won the 2004 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Ducey's work has appeared in River City, Malahat, Elixir, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He was the recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board grant in 2000 and received the MFA from the University of Notre Dame. He currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Rhinoceros was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa. In this collection, Ducey riffs on history, mythology, desire, death, sex and even food. These are poetic investigations of the human impulses of comedy and tragedy.

“Like the tight rope walker over Niagara Falls who pauses halfway to light his stove and scramble an egg, Ducey lyrics his satiric way through history, juxtaposing revered heroic myths against our present Empire. It's the Colosseum all over again, Fellow Americans – gladiators, Christians, lions – with signature updates. Read and be amazed at these poems in which 'the Vandals beyond the Rhine' include 'seniors/ unable to afford/ prescription drugs.' I salute Kevin Ducey's lyric gift, his facility with tone, inflection, color, cadence, his deftly parodic voice – and his heart that can say 'I am nothing/ without the light,/ this body'”
-- Marilyn Krys


James McCorkle, winner of the 2003 APR/Honickman Prize in Poetry, lives in Geneva, New York with his wife and two young daughters. He received the MFA and PhD from the University of Iowa, as well as fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the editor of Conversant Essay: Contemporary Poets on Poetry and the author of The Still Performance, a study of postmodern poetry.

“In his introduction to Selected Writings by Charles Olson, Robert Creeley has averred that 'history is a literal story, the activity of evidence.' In the sobering raptures of this wonderful debut, James McCorkle attends to a very great deal of lucent activity, prospecting among evidence as dark and monumental as that of Anselm Kiefer, as tender and dearly cosmic as the occasion of reading Basho to an impatient daughter. And always, the aftermath of evidence is new creation. As McCorkle shows in The Hibernaculum, 'The world is always starting.' Here, I find much more than a bright beginning and promise. I find Vision. I find delightful consequence.”
-- Donald Revell, author of Arcady and My Mojave


Kathleen Ossip's book, The Search Engine, was selected by Derek Walcott for the 2002 APR/Honickman Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 2001 and in such journals as The Paris Review and The Kenyon Review. She teaches at The New School and lives outside of New York with her husband and daughter.

"Of course one has favorites ("Nursling," "Air," "My Luvox"), but the main thing, the grand affair, is the continuity of utterance and single strictness of what Miss Wickwire used to call the poet's imagination, however "wily and wry" the poet concedes such a thing to be. Expressed piety toward the elders (Moore, Bishop) is nicely lollopped (Ossip's verb) by the wildness, indeed the wilderness of it all. An astonishment, this first book, and what a comfort!"
-- Richard Howard


Ed Pavlic's first book of poems, Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2001. His book of essays, Crossroads Modernism (University of Minnesota Press), appeared in 2002. He's an associate professor in the English Department at Union College in Schenectady, NY where he heads the Africana Studies Program.

"To have found Ed Pavlic's Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue gave this judge an infusion of hope. It's a fully conceived book, speaking as a whole from the first lines to the last. What is in here belongs here, and what is in here is consciously shaped. Mr. Pavlic has listened closely to our most profound American art, the blues and jazz, and that music has not only helped him achieve poetic form but allowed him to explore a mesh of experience extraneous to literary theories. He is, doubtless, aware of such theories, but the voices in his poems flow from a denser space, having penetrated a denser reality, returning via the imagination and its many discontents. In many of them, music and its creation/performance are metaphorized into human relationships. This is intimate and soulful work, breathing, brushing, or tonguing its instrument."
-- Adrienne Rich, from the Foreward


Anne Marie Macari, whose book Ivory Cradle received the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2000, is part of the core faculty at the New England College low residency MFA program. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as the Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, Five Points, and many others. She has taught at the Prague Summer Program and has completed a new manuscript called Gloryland.

"The wonders here are those of perception, intuition, union, separation--and all the emotions these provoke. Anger, despair, but also joy, love in its flooding recognitions, relief in the world's insistent substance."
-- Robert Creeley, from the Introduction


Dana Levin's book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen as the winner of the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. It went on to receive many honors, including the 2000 Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2000 GLCA New Writers Award, The John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Levin teaches in the MFA program at Warren Wilson College and directs the Creative Writing Program at College of Santa Fe.

"...at the book's center (and reaching into all the surrounding material) is the surgical theatre, an image, like Plath's bees, metaphorically fertile, its manifold resonances revealed through Levin's extraordinary and demanding intelligence. The danger of such powerful figures is the danger of lesser imagination, imagination content with the first circle of revelation. What in such a smaller talent might have proved repetitious, banal, self glorifying, is, here, the heart of an astonishing book."
-- Louise Gluck, from the Introduction


Since his first collection, Things Are Happening, won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 1998, Joshua Beckman has published two books with Verse Press, Something I Expected to Be Different and Nice Hat. Thanks. (with Matthew Rohrer). His fourth book, Your Time Has Come, is due out in Spring 2004 from Verse. Most recently, a CD of a his live performances with Matthew Rohrer, Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, was also published by Verse. He lives in Staten Island, New York.

"I think he is a visionary poet, by which I mean he is in touch with something tenuous, and that he feels the other voice or the other thing inside him. His virtue here is that his geography is common, and he is too studious of his own route to be dithering or magisterial or magical....There is form, diction, subject matter, language, and music, but it is this imprint, this print, that captures us. If I had to give a name to it–for Beckman–I would call it affection. His identity is through affection. That is his print."
-- Gerald Stern, from the Introduction