Claremont Graduate University Announces Finalists for the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

Claremont Graduate University (CGU) is pleased to announce this year's finalists for the $100,00 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The awards are among the world's richest and most distinguished for books of poetry.

The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award is given annually for a book by a poet who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career. Finalists for 2013 are:

• Marianne Boruch, The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press). Boruch, a professor of creative writing and poetry at Purdue University, is the author of eight collections of poetry: View from the Gazebo; Descendant; Moss Burning; A Stick That Breaks and Breaks; Poems: New & Selected; Ghost and Oar; and Grace, Fallen from. She has also written two volumes of essays on poetry, and a memoir.

• Edward Haworth Hoeppner, Blood Prism (Ohio State University Press). Hoeppner directs the creative writing program at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. His previous books of poetry are Rain through High Windows and Ancestral Radio

• Paisley Rekdal, Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press). Rekdal is an associate professor of English at the University of Utah. She is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, A Crash of Rhinos, and Six Girls Without Pants, as well as a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee.

The Kate Tufts Discovery Award is presented annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise. Finalists for 2013 are:

• Rebecca Morgan Frank, Little Murders Everywhere (Salmon Poetry). Frank is an assistant professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, the Georgia Review, Guernica, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She is co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious.

• Francine J. Harris, Allegiance (Wayne State University Press). Harris is a Detroit native whose recent work has appeared in Rattle, Callaloo, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

• Heidy Steidlmayer, Fowling Piece (Triquarterly Books). Steidlmayer's poems have appeared in Literary Imagination, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, River City, and TriQuarterly. She lives in Northern California.

The panel of final judges were Linda Gregerson, poet, professor of English language and literature at the University of Michigan, and past Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award recipient; David Barber, poet and poetry editor of the Atlantic Monthly; Kate Gale, poet, novelist, and managing editor of Red Hen Press; Ted Genoways, award-winning poet and journalist; Carl Phillips, poet, professor of English and African and Afro-American studies at Washington University in St. Louis, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and past Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award recipient.

"We received an impressive range of work this year and we found ourselves with an embarrassment of riches," Gregerson said. "We deeply admire and respect the work of these finalists and we are thrilled and delighted to announce these honors."

Winners will be announced in March and recognized during a ceremony at Claremont Graduate University in April.

Timothy Donnelly of Brooklyn, NY, received last year's Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for The Cloud Corporation. Katherine Larson, a biologist from Arizona, received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Radial Symmetry.

The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, now in its 21st year, was established at Claremont Graduate University by Kate Tufts to honor the memory of her husband, who held executive positions in the Los Angeles Shipyards and wrote poetry as his avocation. The Kate Tufts Discovery Award was launched at CGU in 1993.

Founded in 1925, Claremont Graduate University is the graduate university of the Claremont Colleges. Our five academic schools conduct leading-edge research and award masters and doctoral degrees in 24 disciplines. Because the world's problems are not simple nor easily defined, diverse faculty and students research and study across the traditional discipline boundaries to create new and practical solutions for the major problems plaguing our world. A Southern California based graduate school devoted entirely to graduate research and study, CGU boasts a low student-to-faculty ratio.