The New Criterion is pleased to announce that Dick Allen’s This Shadowy Place has been selected as the winner of the 2013 New Criterion Poetry Prize.
A native of Troy, New York, Allen graduated from Syracuse (B.A.) and Brown (M.A.) Universities and went on to become the Director of Creative Writing and Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair Professor at the university of Bridgeport. He retired in 2001 and currently serves as the poet laureate of Connecticut. Allen has won the Robert Frost Prize and the Pushcart Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. His previous books include The Day Before, Ode to the Cold War, and Present Vanishing which won the 2009 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry. He has published extensively in The New Criterion, as well as in Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and more.
Poetry Prize winners receive $3,000 and publication of their manuscript. This year’s judges were the poet and artist Debora Greger, TNC Editor and Publisher Roger Kimball, and TNC Executive Editor and poet David Yezzi. This Shadowy Place will be available in Fall of 2013 from St. Augustine’s Press.
We invite our readers to enjoy a selection of Allen’s poems from our archives below.
“To be with a koan,” November 2012
Killjoys, March 2011
Taking the bull by the horns, October 2008
France, February 2002
Homefront, March 1992
Cities & empires, October 1985
Funding for the 2013 New Criterion Poetry Prize was generously provided by Joy and Michael Millette.