Celebrating the 2016 National Poetry Series Winners with Founder Dan Halpern

(Dingman, Chelsea) Chelsea Dingman is a graduate instructor at the University of South Florida. Selected for the National Poetry Series by Allison Joseph, her collection Thaw (University of Georgia Press) delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. Unflinching and raw, Dingman’s poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.

(Halpern, Daniel) Daniel Halpern is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Foreign Neon and Something Shining. He has edited over 15 anthologies and books, including Plays in One Act, Writers on Artists, and The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories. For twenty-five years Halpern edited the international literary magazine Antaeus, which he founded in Tangier, Morocco with Paul Bowles. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the PEN Publisher Citation and the first Editor’s Award from Poets and Writers, Halpern has been the publisher and president of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, since 1971. From 1975 to 1995 he taught in the graduate writing program of Columbia University, which he chaired for many years. He has also taught at The New School for Social Research and Princeton University.

(Schultz, Jeffrey) Jeffrey Schultz’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, and elsewhere and have been featured on the PBS Newshour’s Art Beat and Poetry Daily. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Pepperdine University. Schultz is the author of two National Poetry Series Selections: What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other and his latest, the 2016 selection Civil Twilight (Ecco), chosen by David St. John. Beginning with the idea that nothing can be seen clearly in the light of the present, the poems in Civil Twilight attempt to resuscitate lyric’s revelatory impulse by taking nothing for granted, forming their materials under the light of a critical gaze. Turning a call to be “civil” on its head, this collection nudges the reader toward revolution.

(Daniels, Jim) Jim Daniels's recent books include Apology to the Moon, Birth Marks, and Eight Mile High (stories). He is also the writer/producer of a number of short films, including The End of Blessings. Born in Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Rowing Inland (Wayne state University Press), Jim Daniels’s fifteenth book of poetry, is a time machine that takes the reader back to the Metro Detroit of his youth and then accelerates toward the future. With humor and empathy, the author looks at his own family’s challenges and those of the surrounding community where the legacy handed down from generation to generation is one of survival.

(Iglesias, Legna) Legna Rodríguez Iglesias was born in Camagüey, Cuba, in 1984, and moved to Miami in 2015. She is the author of numerous books of prose and poetry, and won the Wolsan-CubaPoesía Prize in 2013 for La gran arquitecta. She is also the author of Todo sobre papá, a book of poetry for children, and will soon publish her third novel, Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog francés. She is this year’s winner of the Paz Prize for Poetry for her collection, Miami Century Fox (Akashic Books). Translated by Eduardo Aparicio, Miami Century Fox is a delightful, seductive read. Sonnets? Rhyme and meter? Yes, along with a delicious serving of irony and wit. This is one very smart collection of poems—a loving and sly portrait of Miami and the immigrant experience in the twenty-first century. The Paz Prize for Poetry is presented by the National Poetry Series and Miami Book Fair. This annual award—named in the spirit of the late Nobel Prize–winning poet, Octavio Paz—honors a previously unpublished book of poetry written originally in Spanish by an American resident. An open competition is held each May, when an esteemed Spanish-speaking poet selects a winning manuscript. (Rodriguez Iglesias, Legna) Legna Rodriguez Iglesias Nacida en Cuba, obtuvo el Premio Iberoamericano de Cuento Julio Cortázar 2011 y es ganadora del Premio Casa de las Américas 2016 de teatro. Es autora, además, de varios libros como Chupar la piedra (poesía), Tregua Fecunda (poesía), Hilo+Hilo (poesía), Las analfabetas (novela), No sabe/no contesta (cuento), Mayonesa bien brillante (novela), Dame Spray (poesía), Todo sobre papá (poesía para niños) y Transtucé. Su último libro publicado en Cuba es Chicle (ahora es cuando), poesía, en edición bilingüe de la Editorial Letras Cubanas 2016. Con el libro de poesía Miami Century Fox recibió el Premio Paz 2016 que otorgan la Feria del Libro de Miami del MDC y The National Poetry Series. Legna leerá versos de esa obra en una sesión de poesía y también presentará Mi novia preferida fue un bulldog francés (Alfaguara), libro en el que varias historias interconectadas exploran contradicciones de la vieja y la nueva Cuba, donde política, cultura, familia, amor, sexo y burocracia se entremezclan para formar un universo complejo e implacable.

(sax, sam) sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He has received many prestigious fellowships, including the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. He is the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award, and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals. In his powerful debut collection, Madness (Penguin), selected for the National Poetry Series by Terrance Hayes, sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners.

(Pimentel, Sasha) Sasha Pimentel is the author of For Want of Water and Other Poems (Beacon Press), winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series, and Insides She Swallowed, winner of the 2011 American Book Award. Born in Manila and raised in the United States and Saudi Arabia, she is a professor of poetry and creative nonfiction in the bilingual MFA Program at the University of Texas at El Paso. Selected by Gregory Pardlo as winner of the National Poetry Series, For Want of Water and Other Poems contains searing verses set on the Mexican border about war and addiction, love and sexual violence, grief and loss.  This collection weaves the personal with recent history, the domestic with the tragic, asking how much “a body will hold,” reaching from the border to the poet’s own Philippines.

(Brewer, William) William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind, a winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series, as well as the chapbook Oxyana, which was awarded the Poetry Society of America's 30 and Under Chapbook Fellowship. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Nation, and A Public Space, among others. Brewer is currently a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His debut collection, I Know Your Kind (Milkweed), selected for the National Poetry Series by Ada Limón, is a haunting, blistering collection about the American opioid epidemic and poverty in rural Appalachia.  In these poems, William Brewer demonstrates an immersive, devastating empathy for both the lost and the bereaved, the enabled and the enabler, the addict who knocks late at night and the brother who closes the door.