Inaugural Book Prize Winner Delivers Reading
21 September 2018 Inaugural Book Prize Winner Delivers Reading
Erica Trabold, winner of the inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize,delivered a reading from her new book,Five Plots, on Thursday, Sept. 20 in the Hirshson Ballroom.Five Plotswill be published bySeneca Review Books, a new imprint of Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press on Tuesday, Nov. 6.
The late poet and essayist Deborah Tall revolutionized the literature of place by changing our understanding of how potently we can be impacted by the conflagrations of landscape, family and memory, says John DAgata 95, the 2017-18Trias Writer-in-Residenceand judge of the inaugural book prize. Now, Erica Trabold kick-starts a new book series named for Deborah Tall with a debut that imaginatively probes its own part of the word through humor, history, speculation and hurt. This is a pinprick of a book with a very generous heart.
DAgata notes that the books combination of nostalgia and landscape makes me think itll be the perfect inaugural winner of this new Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Prize, since its namesake explored many of the same issues in her own extraordinary works of nonfiction, such asFrom Where We Stand,A Family of StrangersandThe Island of the White Cow.
Traboldis a Nebraska-born writer whose lyric essays have appeared inThe Rumpus,Passages North,The Collagist,South Dakota Review,Seneca Review,Essay Dailyand elsewhere. A graduate of Oregon State Universitys MFA program and the University of Nebraska at Omaha, she writes and teaches in Portland, Oregon.
Named for the late poet and HWS professor of English, the biennial book series was founded by the editors ofSeneca Review,the Colleges national literary journal, in 2017 to support innovative work in the essay form, includingcross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or serial pieces, and/or beyond category projects.
Tall, who taught literature and writing at HWS editedSeneca Reviewfrom 1982 to 2006, authored four books of poems and several nonfiction works, and was coeditor with Stephen Kuusisto 78 and Professor of English David Weiss ofThe Poets Notebook, which originated from a special issue ofSeneca Review. In 1997, Tall and DAgata promulgated the lyric essay and helped bring it into popular awareness.
The submissions period for the next Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize will begin in the summer of 2019.