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News Release
 
PRESS NEWS/May 8, 2008
Barbara Maloutas Wins $1,500 Sawtooth Poetry Prize Awarded by
Boise State University's Ahsahta Press
Boise State University’s Ahsahta Press announced that Barbara Maloutas of
Los Angeles has been selected as the winner of the seventh annual $1,500
Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Maloutas’ work was selected by poet C.D. Wright, a
Brown University professor and MacArthur Fellow who is the author of
“Rising, Falling, Hovering.”
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Barbara Maloutas
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The winning manuscript, “the whole Marie,” will be released in January 2009.
The runners-up were Kirsten Kaschock of Philadelphia for “a beautiful name
for a girl” and Rachel Loden of Palo Alto, Calif., for “Dick of the Dead.”
Both books also will be published by Ahsahta Press.
Maloutas is the author of “In a Combination of Practices” and a chapbook,
“Practices.” Her work has appeared in Aufgabe, FreeVerse, Segue, Tarpaulin
Sky, The New Review of Literature, Good Foot, bird dog, dusie, Greatcoat and
elsewhere. Her work is anthologized in “Intersections: Innovative Poets of
Southern California” and Segue’s fifth anniversary issue. She teaches in the
book arts program at Otis College of Art and Design and lives in Los
Angeles.
The press received 740 entries for this year’s competition, a record for the
press. As in the past, the editorial board — made up of Ahsahta Press
director and editor-in-chief Janet Holmes and graduate students in the MFA
program in creative writing at Boise State — read through the manuscripts
and culled them to a manageable number of semi-finalists and finalists.
“It was a bit more difficult this year than in the past,” Holmes said. “Our
judge this year had a number of other projects going at the same time, and
asked us to send her only 12 finalists. Usually we send twice that number.”
After selecting 42 semi-finalists, the students selected manuscripts to
champion and engaged in the process of narrowing down the field. “There was
actually quite a bit of consensus on the top manuscripts,” Holmes said.
“Though in the end we had 13 instead of just 12.”
The process of reading so many manuscripts and selecting the finalists is
invaluable for the grad students, Holmes said. To champion the manuscripts
they judge the best, they need to come up with their own evaluative criteria
about what makes a manuscript of poems succeed.
Next year’s Sawtooth Poetry Prize contest will be held between Jan. 1-March
1, 2009, and judged by poet Rae Armantrout, author of “Next Life” and nine
other books of poetry, who teaches at the University of California–San
Diego.
Ahsahta, a name taken from the Mandan word for “Rocky Mountain bighorn
sheep,” has produced over 80 volumes of poetry since its founding in 1974.
The press maintains a website at
http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu and distributes its books through
Small Press Distribution, Berkeley, California.
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Media contact: Julie Hahn, University Communications, (208) 426-5540,
juliehahn@boisestate.edu
AfterWork is a new Boise State University program that allows adults to
complete their entire bachelor’s degree through a combination of evening,
weekend and online classes without exiting from their career track. More
information is available at
www.boisestate.edu/afterwork.
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Last reviewed on
Friday, May 09, 2008
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