Anuradha Bhowmik of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is the 2021 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her collection Brown Girl Chromatography, selected by new Starrett Poetry Prize judge and award-winning poet Aaron Smith. Bhowmik, a Bangladeshi-American poet and writer from South Jersey, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Pitt Poetry Series this fall, on sale September 2022. “Brown Girl Chromatography is pure fire, a slow burn to the center of desire,” said Smith. “This is a book of longing, of brokenness, of makeup (‘my second art, the perfect counterpart to my alter ego’), of…

Laura Kolbe of Brooklyn, NY is the 2020 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize for her collection Little Pharma. Kolbe, a physician, medical ethicist, and poet, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press/Pitt Poetry Series next fall. “The earliest of these poems were written in my first year of medical school in 2012, with the bulk of them written during my medical residency, a grueling and surreal time in my life,” said Kolbe, a native of Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. “Writing the poems felt like growing a subsistence garden—what do I need to make to survive? Or…

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,…