Marianne Boruch Wins Claremont Graduate University's $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for 2013

Claremont Graduate University (CGU) is pleased to announce that Marianne Boruch of West Lafayette, Indiana, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her book The Book of Hours (Copper Canyon Press). The award, given annually to a mid-career poet, is one of the largest monetary poetry prizes in the United States.

Heidy Steidlmayer of Vacaville, California, has won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for her book Fowling Piece (Tri-Quarterly). The Kate Tufts Discovery Award is given annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise.

"We are delighted to honor these poets and celebrate their achievements," said Wendy Martin, director of the Tufts Poetry Awards program and vice provost at Claremont Graduate University. "These awards will help them gain wider recognition and will sustain their continuing commitment to writing outstanding poetry."

Boruch teaches creative writing at Purdue University and in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Her poetry collections include Grace, Fallen from (Wesleyan, 2008) and Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin, 2004). She's written two books of essays on poetry-In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005) and Poetry's Old Air (Michigan, 1993)-and a memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana, 2011). She has received Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright/visiting professorship at the University of Edinburgh, fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, and residencies from the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center and Isle Royale National Park. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, APR, the Yale Review, and the London Review of Books.

Steidlmayer's poems have appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Literary Imagination, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award. Fowling Piece was also awarded the 2012 John C. Zacharis Award for the best debut from a Ploughshares contributor.

The Kingsley Tufts award, now in its 21st year, was established at Claremont Graduate University by Kate Tufts to honor the memory of her husband, who held executive positions in the Los Angeles Shipyards and wrote poetry as his avocation. The award is presented for a work by a poet who is past the very beginning but has not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career. The Kate Tufts Discovery Award was initiated in 1993 and is presented annually for a first book by a poet of genuine promise.