2019 National Poetry Series Winners

Amy Gerstler is a writer of poetry, nonfiction, and journalism. Her ten previous poetry collections include Bitter Angel, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Dearest Creature, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Amy Gerstler’s new collection, Scattered at Sea (Penguin Books) evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing wild oats, minds, and mortality. Using dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, Gerstler draws from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences. The Washington Post compared Scattered at Sea with “a wave that knocks you over and changes how you view the world. . .[It] mixes salty humor, invigorating rhythms and sharp-edged wisdom.”

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.

Heid E. Erdrich is the author of seven collections of poetry. Her writing has won various fellowships and awards including from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, and  the Minnesota State Arts Board. She has twice won a Minnesota Book Award for poetry. Heid E. Erdrich’s collection of poems, Little Big Bully (Penguin Books) begins with a question asked of a collective and troubled “we”: how did we come to this? In answer, this book offers personal myth, American and Native American contexts, and allegories driven by women’s resistance to narcissists, stalkers, and harassers. The past for Indigenous people; the ecosystem collapse from near-extinction of bison, and the present epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women underlie these poems. In Erdrich’s voice, survivors shout back. Ms. Magazine praised Erdrich as she “takes on environmental destruction, missing and murdered Indigenous women and more, in her characteristic voice: fierce, witty, personal and political.”