Eric McHenry Wins Award from TLS

Eric McHenry Wins The Mick Imlah Poetry Prize 

Congratulations to Washburn professor and 5^th Kansas Poet Laureate Eric McHenry, who is second-place-tie winner of the Mick Imlah Poetry Prize of the Times Literary Supplement. The prize is named after the former TLS poetry editor Imlah. TLS informs readers that “almost 4,000 poems” were entered in the contest. Judges were Alan Jenkins, A. E. Stallings and Andrew Motion. Katherine Lewis won first place, and Emily Yaremchuk shares the 2^nd place award with McHenry. Jenkins notes of “Picking a Prophet” by McHenry: “[its] reasonable tone and unostentatious rhymes convey a sophisticated, almost offhand authority.” Third prize winner is Allen Braden. Jenkins supports the idea of poetry contests: “Art is not a competition; but a competition may encourage art, and reward it.” To read further details and read the winning poems, follow this link. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/mick-imlah-poetry-prize-winners/?CMP=Sprkr-_-Editorial-_-TheTLS-_-Unspecified-_-TWITTER

Eric McHenry grew up in Topeka, Kansas and earned degrees from Beloit College and Boston University. His first book of poems, Potscrubber Lullabies (Waywiser, 2006), won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and in 2010 Poetry Northwest awarded him the Theodore Roethke Prize. He is a contributing editor of Columbia magazine and has written about poetry for the New York Times Book Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe and Slate. He lives in Topeka with his wife, Sonja, and their two children, Evan and Sage, and teaches creative writing at Washburn University. In 2015 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Kansas. Audio files of two of his poems from the recent Odd Evening (2016, Waywiser) is at this link: https://waywiser-press.com/product/odd-evening/  

See my comments about McHenry on a previous blog: http://deniselow.blogspot.com/2015/05/its-eric-mchenry-congratulations-to-5th.html