Visiting Assistant Professor of English Jane Springer has been selected as the 2011 winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award for her book of poetry, Murder Ballad. The award is given by Alice James Books, a nonprofit cooperative poetry press founded in 1973. Springer will receive $2,000 and her book will be published with Alice James Books in May 2012.
Springer’s book was selected from among 800 manuscripts. The award was established by the press in 1986 to honor cooperative member author Beatrice Hawley (Making the House Fall Down, 1977) who died in 1985. The Beatrice Hawley Awards welcomes submissions from emerging as well as established poets who reside in the United States.
Springer’s first book, Dear Blackbird (University of Utah Press, 2007), won the Agha Shaid Ali Prize. Her other awards include an AWP Intro Prize, the Robert Penn Warren Prize for Poetry, an NEA grant, and a Whiting Award. She received her Ph.D. from Florida State University in 2008 and now teaches poetry at Hamilton. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from such publications as Fugue, The Oxford American and The Southern Review.
Alice James Books is named for Alice James—the sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher William James—whose fine journal and gift for writing were unrecognized within her lifetime. Since 1994 the press has been affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington.
