SIX by Julie Marie Wade
SIX, winner of the 2014 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Judge: C.D. Wright Buy this Book Search for a Reading of SIX Near You “I call six times just to be sure you heard,” this speaker announces on the first page. These poems are also the six calls—calls to attention, calls to action, calls to account for something of our own. The speaker in SIX is insistent, scrupulous, and unflinching as she plumbs six essential aspects of...
River Electric with Light by Sarah Wetzel
River Electric with Light, winner of the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Judge: Tracy K. Smith Buy this Book “Sarah Wetzel’s River Electric with Light is a work in search of the sacred and the spiritually significant. Touching down in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Kabul, New York, and Rome, Wetzel’s poems, ranging from lyric meditations to discursive drama, weave themselves from her life as wife, lover, stepmother, and...
t’ai freedom ford Awarded 2015 To the Lighthouse Prize
t’ai freedom ford is a New York City high school English teacher, Cave Canem Fellow, and Pushcart Prize nominee. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Drunken Boat, Sinister Wisdom, No, Dear, The African American Review, Vinyl, Nepantla, Poetry and others. Her work has also been featured in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. In 2012 and 2013, she completed two...
i built a boat with all the towels in your closet, by Leia Penina Wilson
i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown), winner of the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize. Judge: Evie Shockley Buy this Book Leia Penina Wilson’s i built a boat with all the towels in your closet (and will let you drown) is at once a love ballad and a warning. These poems are—at their simplest—about relationships, sex, love, creatures, different kinds (and degrees) of violence, and—at their...
Submit Smart, Submit Relentlessly
April 1st To the Lighthouse Poetry and Clarissa Dalloway “everything but poetry” Book Prize Deadline AROHO asked past To the Lighthouse Winners Julie Marie Wade, Leia Penina Wilson, and Carolyn Guinzio, and Clarissa Dalloway winner Anna Maria Hong, about what winning the TTL and CD Book Prizes has meant to their lives and careers, and about what it took to get there. And now we’re asking you… Have you stopped...
Interview with Jessica Piazza
“Winning the To the Lighthouse Book Prize didn’t impact my career. It launched it. It allowed it.” AROHO asked 2011 To the Lighthouse Winner Jessica Piazza about what winning the To the Lighthouse Book Prize has meant to her and about what it took to get there. AROHO: Has winning the To the Lighthouse Book Prize impacted either you personally or your writing career overall? If so, in what ways? JP: Winning the To the...
Interview with Julie Marie Wade
“You must be relentless. You must not be dissuaded or discouraged. When you have written and revised each piece of work or compilation to its fullest potential, it’s time to send it out into the world and keep sending it out into the world for as long as it takes. This can be years. Don’t give up.” AROHO asked 2014 To the Lighthouse Winner Julie Marie Wade about what winning the To the Lighthouse Book Prize has...
Interview with Carolyn Guinzio
“Submit your work, women writers! To the Orlando Prize, to the To The Lighthouse Prize— to everything for which it is appropriate. That is a caveat, especially since contest fees add up quickly. Know the work of the judge, and make some calculated choices based on aesthetics.” AROHO asked 2010 To the Lighthouse Winner Carolyn Guinzio about what winning the To the Lighthouse Poetry Book Prize has meant to her and about what...
Interview with Leia Penina Wilson
“Sometimes you have to be a snob. Nobody else is going to do that work for you. You have to be generous to yourself. You have to unshy yourself.” AROHO asked 2014 To the Lighthouse Winner Leia Penina Wilson about what winning the To the Lighthouse Book Prize has meant to her and about what it took to get there. AROHO: If we’re remembering correctly, the first time you held the final published product of i built a...
A Lighthouse (Reading) on the Beach
[ezcol_2third][/ezcol_2third] On Tuesday, October 14th, 2014, AROHO and our fabulous partners at Red Hen Press came together with a full crowd of friends and arts enthusiasts for a reading at the Annenberg Community Beach House featuring To the Lighthouse winners, Genevieve Kaplan, Jessica Piazza, and Leia Penina Wilson. The room was packed, the energy high, and the poetry at once riveting and uplifting, playful and powerful....
Julie Marie Wade Awarded 2014 To the Lighthouse Prize
“SIX,” Julie Marie Wade’s breathtaking manuscript, is the winner of AROHO’s 2014 To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize. Finalist Judge C.D. Wright wrote: “I chose SIX not in spite of but because of its discursiveness, its willingness to wander through the poem with technique at hand, but also a permit to allow both substantive and ephemeral material to wander into the field of the poem and...
A. E. Stallings, 2015 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge
AROHO is proud to announce 2015 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge, poet and translator A. E. Stallings. A. E. (Alicia) Stallings studied classics in Athens, Georgia and has lived since 1999 in Athens, Greece. She has published three books of poetry, Archaic Smile (1999), which won the Richard Wilbur Award; Hapax (2000); and Olives (2012). Her new verse translation of Lucretius (in rhyming fourteeners!), The Nature of Things, is...
C.D. Wright, 2014 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge
The 2014 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge is renowned poet and chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, C.D. Wright. C.D. Wright was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. She has published over a dozen books, includingRising, Falling, Hovering(2008); Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems (2007); and a text edition of One Big Self: An Investigation(2003), a project...
Sarah Wetzel Awarded 2013 To the Lighthouse Prize
“River Electric with Light,” Sarah Wetzel’s astounding manuscript, is winner of AROHO’s 2013 To the Lighthouse Poetry Book Prize. Finalist Judge, Tracy K. Smith says, “Like the river of the collection’s title, these poems ride upon a current of arduous insight and indelible imagery. And, like all courageous writing does, they make their own particular peace with the likelihood that even...
Interrobang by Jessica Piazza
Interrobang, winner of the 2011 To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize Judge: Eloise Klein Healy Interrobang is a collection of mostly sonnets that play with various clinical “phobias” and “philias.” Jessica’s stunning, playful, dark, and haunting poems illustrate how “even the worst-case scenario of these pathologies are, fundamentally, just extensions of the dark truths to which every one of...
Tracy K. Smith, 2013 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Tracy K. Smith is the Finalist Judge for the 2013 To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize. About Tracy K. Smith’s Pulitzer Pize winning collection, Life on Mars, Jessica Piazza, 2012 TTL recipient, says: “I’m most affected by “The Speed of Belief,” which is the long elegy poem that makes up a section in Life on Mars. That poem is for her father, and I love to watch the poem move through...
Evie Shockley, 2012 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge
Poet Evie Shockley is the 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize finalist judge. Update to Post: See Evie’s selected winner, Leia Penina Wilson.
Leia Penina Wilson Awarded 2012 To the Lighthouse Prize
The winner of our 2012 To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize was Leia Penina Wilson’s “I built a boat with all the towels in your closet.” Selected by guest judge Evie Shockley, the book will be released by Red Hen Press in fall of 2014. Leia Penina Wilson spends most of her days baking tiny cakes and cookies. On the days she’s not baking, she plays Magic the Gathering and cuddles with her boyfriend on...
Spoke & Dark by Carolyn Guinzio
Spoke & Dark by Carolyn Guinzio, To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize Winner, 2010 Judge: Alice Quinn There is no word for the place between the dying hand and the living hand that holds it, but there is a space between those hands. Spoke & Dark dwells there, in the tensions that inhere between one thing & another: lost & found, future & past, life & afterlife. Using typographical symbols (#, /, and...
Jessica Piazza Awarded 2011 To the Lighthouse Prize
Jessica Piazza’s poetry collection “Interrobang” has been selected by judge Eloise Klein Healy as the 2011 To the Lighthouse Poetry Prize winner. Jessica Piazza was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She earned her B.S. in Journalism from Boston University, where she began work as the Favorite Poem Project, serving as an undergraduate intern for United States Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Jessica cofounded...