January 2013: Jude Nutter is the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Competition Winner. Our judge, Michael Collier, has chosen Jude Nutter’s poem “Fossil Hunting at John Lennon Airport, Liverpool” as the first-prize winner in the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Poetry Competition. First runner-up is Gayle Elen Harvey’s “Bouquet with Flying Lovers” and Monique Wentzel’s “Rearrangement” is second runner-up. Nutter receives an award of $1000 and publication in an upcoming issue of the review.

Collier provided the following comments on the winning poem: “’Fossil Hunting at John Lennon Airport, Liverpool’ is a complex meditation on the ‘clues of passage’ that lead Jude Nutter from Solnhofen limestone used in the construction of the John Lennon Airport to the quarry itself in Germany. The poem is a quietly dramatic narrative of the ways in which the ethics of perception and sensibility compel her to examine not only her relationship with her lover but the world around her. Her extremely keen descriptive eye has given us a kind of mythic rendering of what it’s like to pass through airport security where the trays holding our belongings ‘move away’ from us ‘like little grey boats/ while they stand there waiting, until./ waved forward, they pass, one by one, through/ to the other side.”

Nutter was born in Leeds, North Yorkshire, England, and grew up in northern Germany. Her poems have appeared in journals throughout North America and the United Kingdom. She has published three collections: Pictures of the Afterlife (2002); The Curator of Silence (2007), which won the Ernest Sandeen Prize from the University of Notre Dame and was awarded the 2007 Minnesota Book Award in Poetry; and I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman (2009). She has been living and working in Minneapolis/St. Paul since 1998. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon.

FINALISTS

December 2012: Pushcart Nominees for 2012 Announced. The following five poets, whose poems appeared in Sow’s Ear during 2012, are the magazine’s nominees for Pushcart Prizes: Charles Atkinson, “No Big Thing”; Kevin Boyle, “Pillar Talk”; Sharon Charde, “Thrall”; Priscilla Frake, “Letter from Z in April”; and Scott Lowery, “Uncharted.” The staff of the magazine, who participated in the selection, wish all the nominees the best.

September 2012: Ruth Holzer and Jennifer Atkinson to Read at SAC on October 20. The second “Taste of Poetry” reading at the Shenandoah Arts Council gallery in 2012 will feature poets Ruth Holzer and Jennifer Atkinson. Besides spectacular poetry, the audience will be treated to seasonal sweets and hot spiced cider, besides the usual wine, beer and other beverages.

Ruth Holzer, who grew up in New Jersey, studied in London and now lives in Herndon, Virginia, has been published widely in magazines, such as Southern Poetry Review, The Formalist, California Quarterly, Frogpond and The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review. She has published two collections: The First Hundred Years (2004) and The Solitude of Cities (2006). A free-lance editor and translator, she has received the Edgar Allen Poe Award and the Members’ Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia. She has worked as a government writer, editor and linguist.

Jennifer Atkinson teaches in the English Department and the MFA creative writing program at George Mason University. Before joining the faculty at GMU, she taught in Nepal and Japan, and at the University of Iowa and Washington University. Her poetry and nonfiction can be read in Poetry, Field, Yale Review, Shenandoah, Image and elsewhere. She has published four collections of poems: The Dogwood Tree, The Drowned City (which won the Samuel French Morse Prize), Drift Ice, and, in 2012, Canticle of the Night Path (which won Free Verse’s New Measure Prize). She holds an MFA in poetry writing and an MA in creative nonfiction from Iowa.

The reading is at 7:00 p.m. on October 20, 2012 at the Shenandoah Arts Council gallery, 811 S. Loudoun St., Winchester, VA, and is co-sponsored by Sow’s Ear and SAC. Admission is free, but donations are welcome.

September 2012: Ebenbach Schedules Reading Tour. Sow’s Ear contributor David Ebenbach has informed us of a reading tour over the coming months, involving his new short-story collection Into the Wilderness and, starting in 2013, his new poetry chapbook Autogeography. So far, events are scheduled for New York, New Jersey, and other East-Coast locations.

David read in our “Taste of Poetry” series in August 2012.

For details and updates: davidebenbach.com/find-the-author/events/

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August 2012: New Book Coming From Tom Moore. We’ve heard from Tom Moore that a new book, Chet Sawing, will be published by Fort Hemlock Press in November 2012. It contains two poems that appeared in Sow’s Ear—the title poem and “New Dawn Chapel.”

August 2012: Lautermilch Chapbook Receives Awards. We’ve learned that Steve Lautermilch’s chapbook Rim has received two awards recently—Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s Brockman-Campbell Award Competition for 2012 and the 2012 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award of the New England Poetry Club. One of the poems in the chapbook, “Basho on Basho,” first appeared in Sow’s Ear, and the manuscript of Rim was published in chapbook form as the winner of the 2010 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition. He has work forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal

August 2012: David Ebenbach and Kelly Cherry Kick Off Third Annual “Taste of Poetry” Readings. For the third consecutive year The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and the Shenandoah Arts Council will co-sponsor a pair of readings at the SAC gallery in Winchester, Virginia. Dates are August 18 and October 20, with events beginning at 7:00 p.m. The August 18 reading features David Ebenbach, faculty member in creative writing at Georgetown University, and Kelly Cherry, Poet Laureate of Virginia. The October reading will include Jennifer Atkinson, faculty member in creative writing at George Mason University, and another poet TBA.

David Ebenbach’s poems have appeared, among other places, in The Beloit Poetry Journal, Subtropics, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Sow’s Ear. A collection of poems, Autogeography, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. He is the author of two prize-winning collections of short stories, Between Camelots and Into the Wilderness, and his non-fiction book on the creative process, The Artist’s Torah, is forthcoming. He has been the recipient of awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Besides an MFA from Vermont College, Ebenbach holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Kelly Cherry has published twenty books of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, along with eight chapbooks and translations of two classical plays. Her most recent titles are a collection of short stories, The Woman Who (2010), The Retreats of Thought: Poems (2009), and Girl in a Library: On Women Writers & the Writing Life (2009). New collections of poems, The Life and Death of Poetry and Vectors: J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Years Before the Bomb are forthcoming. She has received awards and fellowships from the NEA, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. She was a Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2010. She is currently Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She lives in Halifax, Virginia.

As in previous years, attendees will be treated not only to wonderful poems but also to something to delight the palette. A wine reception will precede the reading, and ice cream with all the toppings will be served at intermission.

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July 2012: Jane Schapiro Wins 2012 Chapbook Prize. Judge Sam Rasnake chose Jane Schapiro’s manuscript, Mrs. Cave’s House, as the winner of the 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition. She receives a $1000 award and publication of her book, which will go out to review subscribers as the Spring 2013 issue.

Designated runners-up are Daniel Lusk for Kin: A Sort of Bestiary and Grace Bauer for The Book of Uncommon Prayer. This year 135 entries were received.

Schapiro, who lives in Annandale, Virginia, has been a finalist in this contest previously and has read at the Shenandoah Arts Council gallery in Winchester. Robert Lesman, managing editor of Sow’s Ear, is quick to point out that these are not requirements for winning the contest, however. A short bio of Schapiro is found in the August 2011 announcement regarding “Taste of Poetry” readings.

Following are the finalists in the 2012 Chapbook Competition:

FINALISTS

April 2012: Cover Artist Has New York Show. The artist whose beautiful graphic art graced the cover of our Summer 2010 issue, Asuka Hishiki, is having an exhibition, “A Window on Nature,” at the Arsenal Gallery in New York from April 26 – June 6, 2012. An artist’s reception will be held on April 25 from 6:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m. the gallery, located at 5^th Avenue at 64^th Street, 3rd floor. For more information visit www.nyc.gov/parks/art.

April 2012: Collier to Judge Fall Contest. The judge for our Fall 2012 Sow’s Ear Poetry Competition honoring a single poem is poet, translator, editor and critic Michael Collier, who currently teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park. The director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference since 1995, he edited The Wesleyan Tradition: Four Decades of American Poetry (1993) and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology (2000). Collier grew up in Phoenix and studied with William Meredith at Connecticut College. He has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the Gugenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His sixth collection of poems, An Individual History, will be published in the spring of 2012.

February 2012: New Books by Sow’s Ear Poets. Three poets who’ve appeared in the Review in the past couple of years have published collections recently. We wish them and their books well.

Michael Miller, whose poems “The Goat” and “Cracks in the House” appeared in the Winter 2009 and Winter 2011 issues, respectively, has published The Singing Inside (Birch Brook Press, 2012). The book is a letterpress edition printed on 80-lb. Mohawk Vellum and features three woodcut engravings by Frank C. Eckmair. Miller lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Finishing Line Press of Georgetown, Kentucky, this year published Mark DeFoe’s tenth book of poems, In the Tourist Cave. DeFoe is Professor Emeritus of English at West Virginia Wesleyan College, where he mentors students in WVW’s MFA writing program. Sow’s Ear published his poem “The Lifters” in the Winter 2010 issue. He has read in Winchester at the Shenandoah Arts Council Gallery.

Judy Halebsky lives in San Francisco and teaches at Dominican University of California. We’ve just received her new book, Space/Gap/Interval/Distance, published by Sixteen Rivers Press earlier this year. It contains “Dig Me up at the Riverbed,” which appeared in our Summer 2011 issue. She read with Mark DeFoe in Winchester in August of 2010.

December 2011:  Pushcart Nominees for 2011.  The Sow's Ear Poetry Review congratulates the following poets whose work was chosen by the staff for 2011 Pushcart Prize nominations:  Marilyn Annucci, "Ice"; Laura Davenport, "On Turkey Creek"; Kate Peper, "Zen Cow"; and Adam Tavel, "Marlboro Purslane."  We wish these nominees all the best.

December 2011: Poetry Competition Winner and Finalists. Judge Scott Cairns chose Charles Atkinson’s poem, “No Big Thing” as the winner of our 2011 Poetry Competition. Cairns commented on the poem’s “very accomplished sense of line…and an overall exemplary prosody”; it “offers a pleasing mix of ironic demeanor and serious matter” yielding “a profound (if still playful) grappling with mortality.” The poem will be published in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review in an upcoming issue.

Charles Atkinson won the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition in 2005 with Because We are Men and was a finalist in the 2010 Sow’s Ear Poetry Competition. His first collection, The Only Cure I Know (San Diego Poets), received the American Book Series award for poetry; a chapbook, The Best of Us on Fire, won the Wayland Press competition. His most recent collection is Fossil Honey, from Hummingbird Press. He has also received the Stanford Prize, the Comstock Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Award (SUNY Farmingdale), the Emily Dickinson Award (Universities West Press), and The Ledge Poetry Prize. He lives in Soquel, California.

FINALISTS

August 2011: Sow’s Ear Co-Sponsors Second Annual “Taste of Poetry” Readings in Winchester. The success of the two “Taste of Poetry” readings in 2010—featuring Judy Halebsky, Mark DeFoe, Wendell Hawken and Steve Scafidi—encouraged us to do it again this year on August 20 and October 1 at the Shenandoah Arts Council Gallery. SAC will again co-sponsor.

On August 20, we start the evening at 7:00 with refreshments focusing on sangria and tapas. Then we are treated to readings by Mary-Sherman Willis of Woodville, VA, and Steve Lautermilch of Kill Devil Hills, NC.

Willis’s poems and reviews have appeared in the New Republic, Iowa Review, Shenandoah and elsewhere. Her poems have been featured in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry” and in anthologies. A graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers, she teaches creative writing at George Washington University.

Steve Lautermilch won the 2010 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition for his collection, Rim. A photographer as well as a poet, Steve has traveled the Far West exploring the landscapes of its first peoples. His poetry collection Fire, Seed, and Rain won the 2008 Long Leaf Press competition. Individual poems have appeared in such magazines as The Antigonish Review, Prairie Schooner, and Southern Poetry Review. He taught for twenty years at University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

The reading on October 1 will feature Jane Schapiro and Perry Epes. Jane Schapiro, who lives in Annandale, Virginia, received a B.A. in Anthropology from The Colorado College and has done graduate work at George Mason University. Washington Writers’ Publishing House published her poetry collection Tapping This Stone in 1995, and she has published poems in such magazines as The Gettysburg Review, The American Scholar, and Poetry East. Her non-fiction book Inside a Class Action: The Holocaust and the Swiss Banks was published in 2003 by the University of Wisconsin Press. W. Perry Epes teaches at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds the MFA from George Mason University, as well as degrees from the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia. His poems have been published in Phoebe, Negative Capability, GW Forum and elsewhere. His collection Nothing Happened was published by The Word Works in 2010.

Readings begin at 7:00 p.m., August 20 and October 1, at the Shenandoah Arts Council Gallery, 811 S. Loudoun St., Winchester, VA, 22601. Donations are gladly accepted.

August 2011: Sandra Kohler Publishes New Collection. We’re pleased to hear that Sandra Kohler has had a collection of poems, Improbable Music, published by Word Press earlier this year. It includes “White,” which originally appeared in The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review in 2003. See www.word-press.com/Kohler.html for details.

Her poem “Unveiling” was in a more recent issue of Sow’s Ear, and she has placed poems in such magazines as The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, The Gettysburg Review and The Colorado Review, as well.

August 2011: Chapbook Prize Goes to Sydney Lea. The winner of the 2011 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition for his manuscript Mahayana in Vermont is

Sydney Lea. Judge Sam Rasnake chose Lea’s entry for the award of $1000 and publication of the chapbook, which will be sent to subscribers as the Spring 2012 issue of the magazine.

Lea, who lives in Newbury, Vermont, founded the New England Review in 1977 and was its editor for twelve years. One of his previous poetry collections, Pursuit of a Wound, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, from such foundations as the Rockefeller, Fulbright and Guggenheim, Lea has published poetry, fiction, essays and criticism in literary journals across the USA. A recent poetry collection is The Young of the Year (Four Way Books, 2011.) I Was Thinking of Beauty is scheduled for publication in 2013 by the same press.

June 2011: Chapbook Competition Finalists. The following manuscripts have been selected as finalists in the 2011 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Competition by judge Sam Rasnake. The announcement of the winner is expected in July.

FINALISTS

April 2011: Scott Cairns to Judge Fall 2011 Contest. The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review’s fall competition honoring a single poem will have Scott Cairns as judge.

Cairns is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. He is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected, from Paraclete Press. He co-authored, with W. Scott Olsen, the anthology The Sacred Place (1996). In 2007, he published a spiritual autobiography, Short Trip to the Edge and a collection of translations, Love’s Immensity: Mystics on the Endless Life. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, such as Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Image, and The Western Humanities Review.

Entries in the fall contest, offering a prize of $1000, will be received in September and October, with a November 1 postmark deadline. See the “Competitions” page for details.

January 2011: 2009 Chapbook Contest Winner Collects Two Awards. We’re pleased to learn that Kathleen Spivack’s A History of Yearning