2019 National Poetry Series Winners

Sherod Santos is a poet and essayist and the author of seven books of poetry including The Intricated Soul: New and Selected Poems, The Perishing, The Pilot Star Elegies, The City of Women; The Southern Reaches; and Accidental Weather, which was selected for the National Poetry Series. He also published A Poetry of Two Minds, a collection of his essays. In Square Inch Hours (W. W. Norton), which was long-listed for the National Book Award, Sherod Santos offers a poetic meditation that draws on elements from fiction, memoir, daybook, and reverie, piecing together moments in the aftermath of a breakdown. In these poems, the speaker turns his focus to reality in its minute particulars: the palsied hand of a grocery clerk; copulating flies on a windowsill; a deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door. Square Inch Hours alludes to his urge to capture each moment, as in the square of a photograph. Through intense sensual perception, he begins to reconnect with the world. Best selling author Amy Bloom called it a “brilliant collection, where the incisive, rhythmic imagery of poetry meets the depth and narrative of fiction. Every page evokes and invites the reader to see more clearly, to imagine more wildly, to read and to breathe more deeply.”

Daniel Halpern is the author of eight collections of poetry, and has received numerous grants and awards (including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the 1993 PEN Publisher Citation). For twenty-five years he edited the literary magazine Antaeus. He is currently Editorial Director of The Ecco Press/HarperCollins.

Diane Louie was born in Newfoundland and grew up in Connecticut. Her work has appeared in Epoch, Arts & Letters, FIELD, TriQuarterly, Cloudbank and elsewhere. She thinks of prose poems as little events. They are happening and happenings. In Fractal Shores (University of Georgia Press), selected by Sherod Santos for the National Poetry Series, they draw on experience, image, metaphor, and all the properties of language to create little worlds-in-motion. They spin while orbiting, shifting our point of view. Marrying the inquiries of science and spiritual longing can illuminate what they–and we–have in common: a desire to understand our presence in a universe that does not yield ultimate answers.