Ricks to Receive Award at MLA

Christopher Ricks to receive distinguished scholar award from the Keats-Shelley Association of America, presented by former ALSCW president  Susan Wolfson at MLA.

The Keats-Shelley Association of America’s annual awards dinner (at MLA) will be held this year on Saturday January 8th 2011.  A cash bar opens at 5:30 pm and dinner begins at 7:00 pm, at the Standard Hotel Downtown Los Angeles, 550 S. Flower at Sixth street.  You do not need to be a member of the MLA or a registrant at the convention in order to attend this event.

This year the Association will honor distinguished scholars Christopher Ricks and Julie Carlson. For reservations, send $60 to;

Steven Jones, Vice President KSAA – Loyala University Chicago

Department of English <www.luc.edu/depts/english>

Crown Center 421

1032 W. Sheridan Road

Chicago, IL 60660.

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Campion Receives Larry Levis Reading Prize

Literary Imagination Editor Peter Campion has won the thirteenth annual Larry Levis Reading prize given by Virginia Commonwealth University for the best first or second book of poetry published in that year.  The winning book, The Lions, was published by the University of Chicago Press. On September 24th at the Grace Street Theater in Richmond, VA, Peter read from his work at the final event of the Conference that celebrates the award and the legacy of the power Larry Levis.  The other keynote readers were Philip Levine and David St. John.  Participants included Claudia Emerson, Stanley Plumly, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Michael Collier, and many others.

Gans Awarded ENDURING QUESTIONS Grant from NEH

Congratulations are in order to ALSC member Bruce Gans, who has been awarded a $15,000 Enduring Questions grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Enduring Questions grant seeks to encourage both faculty and undergraduates to “grapple with the most fundamental concerns of the humanities.” Gans’ award was given in recognition of his proposed course on the Enduring Question “What is Freedom?” which will draw most of its material from amongst the Encyclopedia Britannica’s list of Great Books. Gans has been working for many years to integrate Great Books curricula into community colleges, and the NEH’s recognition of the viability of Gans’ methodology is encouraging to all Great Books advocates.

-Thom Plasse

Christopher Ricks Receives a Knighthood

Christopher Ricks, our Immediate Past President, has been knighted for “services to Scholarship” as part of the Queen’s Birthday Honours. Others recognized this year include former British poet laureate Andrew Motion.  In responding to this honor “for services to Scholarship,” Christopher Ricks, with characteristic generosity, praises all the services he has received, returning this statement:

“For services to Scholarship.”  Thanks, that is, to all the services that have generously been done to me. By Boston University, to which John Silber and Jon Westling brought me 23 years ago; by Oxford (Balliol College, Worcester College); by Bristol University; by Cambridge (Christ’s College); and by the Institute of English Studies, University of London. By Oxford University Press, Longman, Faber, Penguin, and (soon) Yale University Press. By the Mellon Foundation. By the British Academy, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Tennyson Society, the Housman Society, and the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. By colleagues and friends among whom it would be invidious to select. These have proved to be the indispensable services.

The ALSC warmly congratulates our colleague and friend Sir Christopher on this honor, and itself is honored by his thanks.

Peter Campion Awarded Rome Prize

The ALSC is proud to announce that Literary Imagination editor-in-chief Peter Campion has recently been awarded the Rome Prize, bestowed by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  This prize, which entails a one-year residency at the American Academy in Rome, is awarded each year to a select group of artists and scholars who represent the highest standard of excellence in the arts and humanities.  The Academy allows honorees to conduct independent study and advanced research in the spirit of artistic innovation and rigorous scholarship against the backdrop of the Eternal City. The Academy of Arts and Letters’ two hundred and fifty members nominate candidates, and a rotating committee of writers selects winners.  This year’s committee included ALSC members Edmund White (Princeton) and Rosanna Warren (Boston University).

Peter Campion is currently an Assistant Professor of Poetry at Auburn University.  His two collections of poems, Other People (University of Chicago, 2005) and The Lions (University of Chicago, 2009), have both met with critical acclaim.  Other accolades include a George Starbuck lectureship at Boston University, a Jones lectureship and Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, and a 2008 Pushcart Prize.

– Chelsea Bell

Daniel Hoffman Awarded L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award

The ALSC is proud to announce that longstanding member and Former Poet Laureate Daniel Hoffman was recently awarded the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award for his latest collection, The Whole Nine Yards.  The prize, established to honor Louisiana State University Press’s director emeritus, Les Phillabaum (1936-2009), has been bestowed in past years on Marilyn Nelson, Henry Taylor, Elizabeth Seidel Morgan, and Betty Adcock.  The Whole Nine Yards offers poems spanning Hoffman’s long career.  They explore violence and transcendence in realistic, gothic, and comic modes, as they tell of war, cold war, domestic violence, bureaucratic oppression, and a compassionate rescue at sea.  Searching and lyrical suites celebrate the births of children, recoup a year in wartime France, and meditate on life and death, the seen and the unseen.  The result is a compelling collection from a distinguished poet.  Hoffman has been the recipient of the Hazlett Memorial Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize, and several grants and fellowships.  His collection Brotherly Love was nominated for the National Book Award as was his critical study, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe.

The Whole Nine Yards will be published by LSU Press in April.

– Chelsea Bell

Adelaide M. Russo Wins Prize for French and Francophone Studies

We are honored to announce that Adelaide M. Russo, professor of comparative literature and French studies at Louisiana State University and contributing-level member of the ALSC, has received the sixteenth annual Aldo and Jeanna Scaglione Prize, which is awarded by the MLA for outstanding scholarly work in French and Francophone studies.

Russo received the award for her book Le Peintre Comme Modèle: Du Surréalisme à L’extrême Contemporain, which looks closely at the connections of visual art and poetry in the twentieth century as well the inspirations that artists, poets, and publishers provide for one another.

The award was presented on December 28, 2008 in San Francisco at the MLA’s annual convention.

– Nicole Baldner

The First Innovations in Reading Prize, Application Now Available

A reprint of a press release of interest.

Each year, the National Book Foundation will award a number of prizes of up to $2,500 each to individuals and institutions–or partnerships between the two–that have developed innovative means of creating and sustaining a lifelong love of reading.

In addition to promoting the best of American literature through the National Book Awards, the Foundation also seeks to expand the audience for literature in America. Through the Innovations in Reading Prizes, those individuals and organizations that use particularly innovative methods to generate excitement and a passionate engagement with books and literature will be rewarded for their creativity and leadership.

Postmark deadline for all materials is February 15, 2009.

Click here to access an application for the First Annual Innovations in Reading Prize.

ALSC Members Selected as National Book Award Finalists

Three ALSC members were recently named finalists for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry: Frank Bidart for Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), Reginald Gibbons for Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press), and Richard Howard for Without Saying (Turtle Point Press). Winners will be announced in each of the categories (Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People’s Literature) on Wednesday, November 19 at the 59^th National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City.  Morgan Entrekin, Sonny Mehta, Lynn Nesbit and Holly Peterson are chairing the event, and Eric Bogosian will emcee.

Please visit www.nationalbook.org for more information.

– Liza Katz