The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College is pleased to announce that the 2016 Paterson Poetry Prize winner is Mark Doty for Deep Lane (W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY).
In Deep Lane, Mark Doty writes of "the wild unsayable," yet manages in this brilliant book to find the precise words to describe what it means to be alive and human with all our flaws. He leads us on a brave journey through grief and loss and joy, to all that lies below the surface of our lives, all the hard-earned moments that redeem us.
FINALISTS for 2016 are:
- Reginald Dwayne Betts, Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, New York, NY)
- Tony Hoagland, Application for Release from the Dream (Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN)
- Patricia Spears Jones, A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems (White Pine Press, Buffalo, NY)
- Adele Kenny, A Lightness, A Thirst, or Nothing at All (Welcome Rain Publishers, New York, NY)
- Richard Michelson, More Money Than God (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA)
- Vivian Shipley, Perennial (Negative Capability Press, Mobile, AL)
The Paterson Poetry Prize of $1000 is given annually by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College to a book of poetry (48 pages or more) published in the previous year, with a minimum press run of 500 copies.
The Poetry Center was named a Distinguished Arts Project and awarded several Citations of Excellence, and is funded, in part, by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.