Founded in 2001 as a joint venture of the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of English and New Virginia Review, Inc.
Copyright © 2021 by Blackbird and the individual writers and artists
ISSN 1540-3068
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Recent Awards for Current and Previous Blackbird Contributors
Robert Wood Lynn won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for his book Mothman Apologia, selected by Rae Armantrout. Yale University Press will publish Lynn’s book in April 2022.
Phillip Williams received a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship for creative writing.
Natasha Trethewey’s book Memorial Drive is the 2021 Southern Book Prize winner for nonfiction.
Kwame Dawes was named editor of the Lincoln Journal Star’s “American Life in Poetry” column.
Kenneth Chacón and Amber McBride were finalists for Best of the Net.
Austin Segrest’s book Door to Remain won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, judged by Karl Kirchwey. The book will be published in 2022 by The University of North Texas Press.
Victoria Chang’s poetry collection, Obit, won the L.A. Times Book Prize for poetry, the Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize.
Also winning the Anisfield-Wolf Book awards were Blackbird contributors Natasha Trethewey for Nonfiction, and Samuel R. Delany for Lifetime Achievement.
Blackbird contributors have been recognized on the 2021 Pen America Literary Awards Longlists: Gerald Stern for the Pen/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection (won by Victoria Chang), and Jesse Lee Kercheval for the Pen Award for Poetry in Translation.
Jesse Lee Kercheval, whose translation (with Laura Cesarco Eglin) of Night in the North by Fabián Severo was named one of World Literature Today’s “75 Notable Translations of 2020.”
Just Us by Claudia Rankine, “a stunning finale to her American Lyric trilogy,” was longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize.
Sue Williams Silverman, Sejal Shah, Sumita Chakraborty, and Lisa Fay Coutley were finalists for the 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards. Winners will be announced in June.
Jacqueline Goldfinger’s play Babel is a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Drama.
Bruce Bond won the 2021 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature for his poetry collection Liberation of Dissonance, which Schaffner Press will publish in spring 2022.
Matthew Wimberley won the Weatherford Award for Poetry for his book All the Great Territories.
Dianne Suess won the 2021 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award goes to writers “whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence.”
Colson Whitehead’s book The Nickel Boys was shortlisted for the 2021 Dublin Literary Award. The winner will be announced May 20th.
Catherine Pierce won the 2021 Award for Poetry from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters for her book Danger Days.
Tyler Mills was the 2021 Winter Grantee from Café Royal Cultural Foundation.
Recent Books by Current and Previous Blackbird Contributors
Appropriate: A Provocation
Paisley Rekdal
W. W. Norton & Company
Bone Seeker
Chris Haven
NYQ Books
Ordinary Psalms
Julia B. Levine
LSU Press
Dear DeeDee
Kat Meads
Regal House Publishing
frank: sonnets
Dianne Seuss
Graywolf Press
Our Cancers
Dan O’Brien
University of Cincinnati Press (September 2021)
Life Among the Terranauts
Caitlin Horrocks
Little, Brown and Company
All the Great Territories
Matthew Wimberley
Southern Illinois University Press
Arrow
Sumita Chakraborty
Alice James Books
Tether
Lisa Fay Coutley
Black Lawrence Press
Dear Memory
Victoria Chang
Milkweed Editions (October 2021)
Places I’ve Taken My Body
Molly McCully Brown
Persea Books