Awards
Robert Greer Cohn Prose Poetry Award
2008 Winner: Marcia Popp
The Robert G. Cohn Prose Poetry Award has been awarded to Marcia Popp from Edwardsville, IL for her prose poem, comfort in small rooms. The award includes a cash prize of $300 and publication of a series of poems selected by the editors of Black Zinnias for a special edition chapbook.
This award is in honor of Professor Robert G. Cohn’s lifetime of work dedicated to literature and poetry. Professor Cohn worked primarily in the field of French Literature, writing over 16 books, numerous articles, and essays focusing on the life and work of Mallarmé, a major book on Rimbaud and several books of cultural criticism. While a student at Yale University, just after World War II, Professor Cohn founded the highly regarded literary journal Yale French Studies.Click here for submission guidelines.
Black Zinnias First Book Award
This award brings first-book publication, a cash prize of $1,000, and publication in the Black Zinnias journal to a writer who has never before published a book of poetry.
2008 Judge: Reginald Shepherd
Black Zinnias is pleased to announce that Reginald Shepherd will be the judge for the award this year. Shepherd is the editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries (University of Iowa Press, 2004) and of Lyric Postmodernisms (Counterpath Press, 2008). He is the author of five volumes of poetry, all with the University of Pittsburgh Press: Fata Morgana (2007), Otherhood (2003), a finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Wrong (1999), Angel, Interrupted (1996), and Some Are Drowning (1994), winner of the 1993 Associated Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry. His book Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry was published in 2008 in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry Series. Shepherd is the recipient of a 1993 “Discovery”/The Nation Award and of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Florida Arts Council, among other awards and honors. He lives with his partner Robert Philen, a cultural anthropologist, in Pensacola, Florida, where magnolias and live oaks are evergreens.
Click here for submission guidelines.