The New Criterion is delighted to announce that The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, by Ned Balbo, has been selected as the winner of the 2019 New Criterion Poetry Prize.

Ned Balbo’s 3 Nights of the Perseids won the 2018 Richard Wilbur Award. His previous books include Upcycling Paumanok; Lives of the Sleepers, awarded the Ernest Sandeen Poetry Prize; and The Trials of Edgar Poe and Other Poems, awarded the Poets’ Prize and the Donald Justice Prize. He is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship for his version of Paul Valéry’s “La Jeune Parque,” three Maryland Arts Council poetry grants, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and more. His poetry and prose appeared recently in The Common, The Dark Horse, The Hopkins Review, The New Criterion, Pleiades, Scoundrel Time, and elsewhere. Balbo is married to the poet-essayist Jane Satterfield and was recently a visiting faculty member in Iowa State University’s MFA program in creative writing and environment.

Poetry Prize winners receive $3,000 and publication of their manuscript. This year’s judges were the poet Morri Creech, The New Criterion Editor and Publisher Roger Kimball, and The New Criterion Poetry Editor and poet David Yezzi. The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots will be available in the fall of 2019 from Criterion Books.

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