Hailey Leithauser Wins the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award

Posted on May 17, 2012

Hailey Leithauser has won the 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award. The award is given by the Poetry Foundation to an American poet of at least 40 years of age who has yet to publish a first collection.

Greywolf Press will publish Leithauser's book-length poetry manuscript Swoop in October 2013. She also will receive a $10,000 prize, and be honored at the Pegasus Awards ceremony on June 11th.

Jeff Shotts, the poetry editor at Graywolf, had this to say about the winning manuscript: "Leithauser is a risk-taker. She is innovative -- with spirited titles and musical outbursts-but also nods to poetic tradition with rhyming sonnets and other lyric techniques. I take delight in so many of these lines and stanzas. I am engaged, throughout, and admire her wide-ranging talent."

Leithauser stopped writing poetry for several decades, but returned to it in 2000. Since then her poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Pleiades, Best American Poetry, and Poetry. In 2004 she won the Discovery/The Nation Award and received an individual artist's grant from the Maryland Arts Council. She has served as the senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., and holds a a BA in English literature and a master's in library and information science, both from the University of Maryland.

You can read her poem "Fever" here.

Photo: Greywolf Press