Gunpowder Press is honored that Jane Hirshfield will be the final judge for the 2017 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize. Barry Spacks had tremendous respect and fondness for Hirshfield and her work, which gives special meaning to this year’s award. Submit your manuscript via Submittable here.
Jane Hirshfield’s most recent, eighth book of poetry is The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long listed for the National Book Award and named a best book of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her newest book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), received the Northern California Book Award. Previous honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. While never a full time academic, Hirshfield has taught or been a poet in residence at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Virginia, the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, U.C. Santa Barbara, and elsewhere. Hirshfield was the 2016 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. In 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
The Barry Spacks Poetry Prize honors Santa Barbara’s first Poet Laureate, Barry Spacks, a guiding spirit of Gunpowder Press. Barry was an influential mentor and teacher.