Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has selected Joseph Stroud and Connie Wanek for the 2006 Witter Bynner poetry fellowships.
The Witter Bynner Foundation in New Mexico, in conjunction with the Library of Congress, grants $10,000 to each fellow to support the writing of poetry. In return, the fellows are asked to organize a local poetry reading (this year, in California and in Minnesota) and to participate in a poetry reading at the Library of Congress.
Past Witter Bynner Fellowship Award winners gather during a break in the poetry readings in the Coolidge Auditorium April 18. The noted poets are, from left, George Bilgere, Carl Phillips, Major Jackson, Carol Muske-Dukes and Rebecca Wee. - Donna Urschel
Stroud, who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., and at Shay Creek in the Sierra Nevada mountains, taught writing and literature classes at Cabrillo College for 35 years and co-hosted KUSP's "Poetry Show." He is the author of four books of poetry, including "Below Cold Mountain" (1998) and "Country of Light" (2004). His work embraces a variety of forms, from short-line lyric to prose poem, and a variety of topics, including landscapes, hard travel and commonplace objects.
Wanek was born in 1952 in Madison, Wis., and lived on a farm near Green Bay until the early 1960s, when her family moved to Las Cruces, N.M., in the Mesilla Valley. Since 1990 she has lived in Duluth, Minn., with her husband and two children. She works at the public library and restores old houses. Her collections of poetry are "Bonfire" (1997), which won the New Rivers Press' New Voices competition; and "Hartley Field" (2002), published by Holy Cow! Press. She has received fellowships and support from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and the Jerome Foundation, and she was the recipient of the 1998 Willow Poetry Prize.
The Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, the funding source for the fellowships, was incorporated in 1972 in New Mexico to provide grant support for programs in poetry through nonprofit organizations. Witter Bynner was an influential early-20th century poet and translator of the Chinese classic "Tao Te Ching," which he named "The Way of Life According to Laotzu." He traveled with D.H. and Frieda Lawrence and proposed to Edna St. Vincent Millay (she accepted, but then they changed their minds). He worked at McClure's magazine, where he published A.E. Houseman for the first time in the United States and was one of O. Henry's early fans.
This is the fellowship's ninth year. Previous fellows were Carol Muske and Carl Phillips (1998); David Gewanter, Heather McHugh and Campbell McGrath (1999) and Naomi Shihab Nye and Joshua Weiner (2000), all appointed by Robert Pinsky; the late Tory Dent and Nick Flynn (2001), appointed by Stanley Kunitz; George Bilgere and Katia Kapovich (2002) and Major Jackson and Rebecca Wee (2003), appointed by Billy Collins; Dana Levin and Spencer Reece (2004), appointed by Louise Glück; and Claudia Emerson and Martin Walls (2005), appointed by Ted Kooser.
