University of Pittsburgh Press is excited to announce Eleanor Boudreau as the 2019 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her collection Earnest, Earnest?. It was selected from over 600 submissions and will be published by UPP next fall. Boudreau will also receive a $5,000 cash prize. “I love puns, but Earnest, Earnest? is more than a pun. At some point, my quest to say what I mean and mean what I say, as a poet, but also as a human being, became a question, Earnest, Earnest?,” said the 35-year-old Cambridge, MA, native. In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker,…

Ryan Black of Jackson Heights, NY is the 2018 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. The University of Pittsburgh Press and Pitt Poetry Series will published his collection, “The Tenant of Fire” in fall 2019. Black will also receive a $5,000 cash prize. In explaining his inspiration behind the collection, Black states: “Kirk Semple, a New York Times metro reporter, described Queens, NY, as a “petri dish for what our increasingly diverse and heterogeneous nation is becoming.” The Tenant of Fire is about Queens—its history, both public and personal, real and imagined—and mines the complex, often contradictory, lived…

The deadline for the 2018 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize is approaching. ABOUT THE PRIZE: Awarded annually for a first full-length book of poems. Named after the first director of the Press, the prize carries a cash award of $5,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Pitt Poetry Series. Winner will be announced in the fall of 2018. DEADLINE: Manuscripts must be received during March and April 2018 (postmarked on or after March 1 and on or before April 30). Each manuscript must include an entry fee of $25.00. We asked several past Starrett Prize winners to tell us what…

If you have yet to publish a full-length book of poems send us your manuscript between March 1- April 30, 2016 for a cash award of $5,000 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Pitt Poetry Series. See the full details here. We would like to congratulate Miriam Bird Greenberg, who was just announced as the 2015 winner of the prize for her collection In the Volcano’s Mouth. Miriam was born in 1980 and grew up in rural Texas. She studied English and studio arts at the University of Pittsburgh, earned an MFA in Poetry from the Michener Center for Writers, and currently…

Nate Marshall, author of Wild Hundreds, winner of UPP’s Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, talks about his love for Chicago’s South Side, hip-hop culture’s influence on his work, and fantasy football. UPP: You are very passionate about the South Side of Chicago, as evidenced in Wild Hundreds, in various interviews and on social media. How would you explain that passion? NM: The South Side is a beautiful place. It can be a hard and complicated place but those are the most rewarding loves. It’s like what Algren says about loving Chicago “you may well find lovelier lovelies but never a lovely so real.”…