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Columbia Alumnus Campbell McGrath Wins $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

Presentation of largest poetry prize for a single work, April 16

These elephantine snowflakes sashaying earthward look about as likely as three-dollar bills. Huge and shambling, avuncular as church-goers, delicately laced as linen doilies, fluffy as kittens or cotton swabs, linked arm in arm in a ticker-tape parade of paper doll Rockettes or lurching like waves of drunken longshoremen... "The Bob Hope Poem" by Campbell McGrath
Campbell McGrath, an alumnus ('88) of the Master of Fine Arts program at Columbia University's School of the Arts and assistant professor of creative writing at Florida International University, has been named the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award at The Claremont Graduate School for his book Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco Press, 1996). The $50,000 award, the largest poetry prize honoring a single work, recognizes McGrath's book as the most worthy collection of poetry published in 1996 by a poet who is past the beginning but has not yet reached the pinnacle of his or her career. As part of the award, McGrath will spend a week in residence at The Claremont Graduate School's Center for the Humanities during the fall 1997 semester. McGrath will read from his award-winning book at the invitation- only award ceremony, which will take place on Wednesday, April 16 at the Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue. (The Kate Tufts Discovery Award for Poetry, given annually to honor a first or very early work by a poet of promise, will also be presented to Lucia Perillo for her book The Body Mutinies (Perdue University Press, 1996)). Campbell McGrath and Lucia Perillo will read from their works at Columbia University on Thursday, April 17 at 8 p.m. in Dodge Hall, room 413. A panel of five distinguished judges chose Spring Comes to Chicago in the national competition. This year's jury consisted of Jack Miles, chair, professor of humanities at The Claremont Graduate School and contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly; Daniel Halpern, founder of the literary journal Antaeus and editor-in-chief at The Ecco Press; Garrett Hongo, poet, critic, anthologist, and professor of creative writing at the University of Oregon; Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker; and Gary Soto, poet, memoirist, storyteller, and publisher. Preliminary judges for the competition were lyricist Doug Brayfield; Robert Faggen, associate professor of English at Claremont McKenna College; and Maurya Simon, associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. "I am surprised and elated," said McGrath. "I am grateful for the recognition that this award brings to poetry and to my book - especially because it took seven years to write. Further, I'm relieved that I'll now be able to pay off my own student loans and make a down payment on my sons'." Spring Comes to Chicago is a work that combines comic ebullience and reflective intelligence in a bravura display of contrasting poetic styles. Summarizing the jury's reaction to "The Bob Hope Poem," a seventy-page tour-de-force that is the work's centerpiece, Miles said, "The tone Campbell McGrath adopts is simultaneously hilarious and troubled. Garrett Hongo called it 'ironic romanticism.' It struck us all as uniquely adequate to the present it-would-be-funny-if-it-weren't-so-sad moment." McGrath was born in Chicago and grew up in Washington, D.C. He attended the University of Chicago and Columbia, where he received his Masters of Fine Arts. He is the author of two previous books of poetry, Capitalism and American Noise, and has been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the Academy of American Poets Prize. He has taught at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, and now teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Florida International University. The Kingsley Tufts Poetry Awards were established through an endowment grant to the Claremont Graduate School valued at more than $1.25 million from Kate Tufts to honor her late husband, poet and writer Kingsley Tufts. 4.1.97 19,084