Professor Wins Top Poetry Award

December 11, 2015

Elizabeth A. Powell, associate professor of writing and literature at Johnson State College and editor of the college’s award-winning literary journal, Green Mountains Review, has received two major national recognitions for her poetry.

For starters, she won the 2015 Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry for her second book of poetry, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances. The award came from Tallahassee, Florida-based Anhinga Press, one of the nation’s premiere poetry presses. Anhinga will publish Powell’s book in 2016.

In addition, poet Anna Maria Hong featured the title poem of Powell’s book, “Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: A Story in Couplets,” in a Nov. 20 Best American Poetry Series blog post titled “The Sonnet, Three Journals, and Four Graces.”

Hong notes that Powell’s soon-to-be-published book of poetry “employs method acting to process the poems’ information, resulting in a provocative mix of verse, essay, drama, and meta-forms in which alternate personas converse as a way to find truth out of erasure.” Powell’s book, she adds, “is like nothing I’ve read in the best possible way.”