Founded in 2001 as a joint venture of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English and New Virginia Review, Inc.
Copyright © 2017 by Blackbird and the individual writers and artists
ISSN 1540-3068
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Recent Awards for Current and Previous Blackbird Contributors
Imaginary Vessels by Blackbird contributor Paisley Rekdal received a 2017 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry and was a Washington State Book Awards finalist. Rekdel was also named Utah’s Poet Laureate.
Tupelo Press has awarded the 2017 Dorset Prize to “America, that Island off the Coast of France” by Blackbird Contributor Jesse Lee Kercheval.
David Wojahn’s nonfiction piece “On Hearing That My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place” and Larry Palmer’s “Urshel: The Beautiful Lost Sheep”—which both appeared in v15n1 of Blackbird—were listed as Notable Essays and Literary Nonfiction of 2016 in The Best American Essays. Pieces written by Traci Brimhall, Carol Ann Davis, Beth Ann Fennelly, Sonja Livingston, and Emilia Phillips, all previous Blackbird contributors, were also selected.
Blackbird contributor Roger Reeves’s poem “Domestic Violence” has received the Poetry Foundation’s Bess Hokin Prize.
Blackbird contributor Kathy Fagan has been selected as the ninth recipient of the Raymond J. Hanley Award, an annual award given by the Greater Columbus Arts Council to an artist demonstrating high achievement in their craft while working for at least five years in any discipline of the arts.
Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Blackbird contributor Jesmyn Ward, is a finalist for the National Book Award.
Blackbird contributor Solmaz Sharif’s debut poetry collection, Look, has received a 2017 American Book Award and is the recipient of VCU’s 2017 Levis Reading Prize.
Seven Blackbird contributors received National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships for this year: Michael Bazzett, Joshua Bennett, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Edgar Lunz, Nick Lantz, Patricia Smith, and Corey Van Landingham.
Blackbird contributor C. Dale Young is the 2017 recipient of the Hanes Award in Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, an award given every two years to recognize a distinguished body of work by a poet in mid-career.
“Black Ice” by K.C. Trommer, which appeared in Blackbird in the spring issue of 2011, is currently being set to music by Grammy Award–winning composer Herschel Garfein. Collaborations by Trommer and Garfein first made their appearance in February 2017 at Five Borough Songbook, Volume II.
Blackbird contributors Brandon Courtney, Kai Carlson-Wee, and Anders Carlson-Wee received honors in the 2017 Eric Hoffer Awards for Excellence in Independent Publishing.
“Self-Portrait as My Mother Would Have It,” by 2016–2017 Blackbird lead associate editor Victoria C. Flanagan, has been awarded this year’s Catherine and Joan Byrne Poetry Prize.
Blackbird contributor Amina Gautier will be a 2017–2018 fellow of the Camargo Core Program in Cassis, France. Her book The Loss of All Lost Things is the winner of the 2017 Phillis Wheatley Book Award for Fiction.
Debra Nystrom’s "Where the Cancer Center’s New Wing Will Be," published in v16n1 of Blackbird, was featured on Poetry Daily in June 2017.
Great Bear, a collection of poems by Blackbird contributor Cathryn Hankla, is a finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Award for poetry.
Tyler Mills’s “Dream of the Morning Before It Split Open,” “Hypothesis: An Interview,” and “Negative Peeled Back from a Cardboard Album”—all published in Blackbird—are part of Hawk Parable,which has been awarded the 2017 Akron Poetry Prize.
Sonja Livingston’s essay “Like This, We Begin: An Essay in Two Photographs” has won the VanderMey Nonfiction Prize from Ruminate Magazine.
Carrie Brown’s novel The Stargazer’s Sister won the Library of Virginia’s People’s Choice Award for fiction in 2017.
Recent Books by Current and Previous Blackbird Contributors
Calling a Wolf a Wolf
Kaveh Akbar
Alice James Books
Some Say the Lark
Jennifer Chang
Alice James Books
Girl After Girl After Girl
Nicole Cooley
LSU Press
Sycamore
Kathy Fagan
Milkweed Editions
The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs: A Novel
Janet Peery
St. Martin's Press
The Broken Country
Paisley Rekdal
University of Georgia Press
The Humility of the Brutes
Ron Smith
LSU Press
Topography of Tears
Allison Titus
Artifact Press
Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel
Jesmyn Ward
Scribner 
