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The Poetry Society of America and the Times Square Alliance present Bright Lights Big Verse: Poems of Times Square, the national contest for poetry celebrating Times Square, and the qualities that Times Square represents—diversity, desire, dynamism and the marriage of commerce and culture.
Bright Lights, Big Verse 2009 Winners (L to R): Henk Rossouw, Mary Jo Bang, Jehanne Dubrow, Ben Miller (all photos by Adam Pantozzi)
The four winners of the second annual Bright Lights Big Verse proudly showcased their work in a public reading at the Crossroads of the World on Tuesday, September 29th, together with readings by other distinguished poets and literary luminaries.
Each winner received $750, plus a trip to New York City with accomodations at the Millennium Broadway Hotel New York, and a free outdoor public reading of their prize-winning work in the heart of Times Square.
The four prize-winning pieces, selected from a pool of close to 500 entries, represent Times Square experiences and impressions as disparate and diverse as their authors – from a family of sparrows nesting in an unlikely urban environment to a meditation on intimacy and estrangement inspired by the famous photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square at the end of World War II.
Bright Lights Big Verse is a testament to Times Square’s ability to provoke strong emotional reactions of every kind, to evoke vivid memories and, above all, to inspire creativity.
- CLICK HERE TO READ THIS YEAR'S FOUR WINNING POEMS! -
WINNERS:
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Mary Jo Bang (St. Louis, MO) - “In a Square of Times Square”
Mary Jo Bang’s fifth collection of poems, Elegy, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her sixth collection, The Bride of E, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press this month. She teaches in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. |
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Jehanne Dubrow (Chestertown, MD) - “VJ Day in Times Square”
Jehanne Dubrow's work has appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Hudson Review. She is the author of a poetry collection, The Hardship Post (Three Candles Press 2009). Two new books are forthcoming within the next year, From the Fever-World (Washington Writers Publishing House) and Stateside (Northwestern University Press). |
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Ben Miller (New York, NY) - “Pipe Birds”
Ben Miller has lived and worked in New York City since 1986, when he arrived from eastern Iowa, where he grew up and attended college. His writing has appeared in many venues, including Best American Essays, The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Salmagundi, Raritan, AGNI, One Story and An Introduction to the Prose Poem (Firewheel Editions, 2009). He is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. |
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Henk Rossouw (Amherst, MA) - “Chez Times Square”
Originally from South Africa, Henk Rossouw lives in Amherst, where he’s in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Tin House, The Threepenny Review, and online in the Virginia Quarterly Review. |
- CLICK HERE TO READ THIS YEAR'S FOUR WINNING POEMS! -
GUEST READERS:
Kimiko Hahn
Kimiko Hahn is the author of seven collections of poetry, including The Narrow Road to the Interior (Norton, 2006). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as an American Book Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award.
Paul Muldoon
Paul Muldoon’s ten collections of poetry include Horse Latitudes; Moy Sand and Gravel, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; and Poems 1968-1998. His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award, the T. S. Eliot Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize. Muldoon worked for BBC Belfast as a radio and television producer and has taught at a number of universities including Cambridge University and Columbia University. He is currently Howard G.B. Clark ’21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford as well as Poetry Editor of The New Yorker.
David Lehman
David Lehman is the author of six collections of poems, including When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). His most recent book of criticism is The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Doubleday, 1998). He is the Series Editor of The Best American Poetry, and the General Editor of the University of Michigan Press's "Poets on Poetry" Series, and has also edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present and the most recent edition of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Lehman's honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award. He teaches in the graduate writing program at the New School.
JUDGES:
Alice Quinn, Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America
Robert N. Casper, Publisher of jubilat
Brett Fletcher, Poetry Editor of A Public Space
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