A Note of Celebration

Once a year it gives us great pleasure to recognize some of the honors awarded to New England Review’s contributors. Our website and e-newsletter keep readers up to date on our authors’ accomplishments and publications throughout the year, but I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge in print several notable awards and distinctions.

Last summer, longtime NER contributor Natasha Trethewey, whose work first appeared in our pages in 1999 and most recently in 2011, was named the Poet Laureate of the United States, a position which she served with distinction and which she will continue to hold in the coming year.

Poetry Editor C. Dale Young was awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, along with contributors Christian Wiman (30.2) and Sarah Manguso (25.4). This year’s Guggenheim Award went to several other NER contributors: Adam Johnson (19.3) and Terese Svoboda (12.1) in fiction; Kate Daniels (10.3) and Cleopatra Mathis (32.2) in poetry. Major Jackson, who recently read in our NER Vermont Reading Series and who offered his judgment for several years as a Reader, was also awarded a Guggenheim in 2013.

This year’s Pulitzer Prize winners in poetry and fiction both published their early work in our pages. Sharon Olds, winner in poetry for her new collection, Stag’s Leap, first appeared in NER in 1979, with the poem “Eggs,” and Adam Johnson, winner in fiction for The Orphan Master’s Son, published the story “The Cassini Satellite” in NER in 1998.

Laura Kasischke, whose writing first appeared in NER in 1994 (16.1) and most recently in 2012 (32.4), won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for her book Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon).

Several of our poets have won Literature Fellowships in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts this year, each receiving an award of $25,000: Traci Brimhall (32.1), Eduardo C. Corral (30.4), and Rachel Richardson (29.1). An award was also made to Jake Adam York (33.3), by whose sudden, premature death in December 2012 we were deeply saddened.

Reginald Dwayne Betts, whose work appears most recently in our current issue, was awarded a 2012 Ruth Lilly Fellowship of $15,000 from the Poetry Foundation.

Longtime contributor Jennifer Grotz has received the Lillian Fairchild Award, which is awarded to a Rochester-area resident who has “created extraordinary artistic work in any medium in the past year.”

This May, Don Share (20.3) was named the new Editor of Poetry magazine.

Greg Pierce’s play Slowgirl, a portion of which appeared in 33.2, enjoyed an extended run as the inaugural play at the Lincoln Center’s new Claire Tow Theater in Summer 2012.

Among the winners of the PEN American Center’s 2012 PEN Literary Awards are Quan Barry (27.2), runner-up for the Open Book Award for Water Puppets, and Bill Johnston (25.1,2), winner of the PEN translation prize.

The Lambda Literary Foundation, the country’s leading national nonprofit organization for the LGBT literary community, awarded the 2012 Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize to Stacey D’Erasmo (31.4).

Recently we’ve learned that several works from NER will appear in the 2013 “Best American” anthologies, to be published this fall by Houghton Mifflin. Poems by Laura Kasischke, Adrienne Su (33.1), and Paisley Rekdal (33.2) have been chosen for Best American Poetry 2013, guest edited by Denise Duhamel (series editor David Lehman). “The Ring of Kerry” by Dennis McFadden (33.2) has been selected for Best American Mystery Stories 2013, edited by Otto Penzler and Lisa Scottoline, and Matthew Vollmer’s “Keeper of the Flame” (33.1) was selected for Best American Essays 2013, guest edited by Cheryl Strayed (series editor Robert Atwan).

The Pushcart Press anthology, which will be released this fall as well, will feature a poem by Jake Adam York, “Self-Portrait as Superman (Alternate Take)” (33.3).

In the meantime, the 2012 Best American anthologies have been released. Selected for Best American Poetry 2012, guest edited by Mark Doty, were Amy Glynn Greacen’s “Helianthus Annus (Sunflower...