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Prize-winning poet Brenda Hillman judged the contest. She selected the manuscript from about 600 entries for the $1,500 award, which also includes publication. The prize will be awarded annually.

McCollough, a doctoral student in English at the University of Michigan, works within a tradition of formal verse that includes sonnets, pantoums, rondeaus, free-verse lyrics and open-field compositions. Throughout, his lively and sensual attention to the music of language animates the poems and brings them continually into the present moment.

"McCollough’s poems are about our everyday lives," said Janet Holmes, a Boise State English professor and director of Ahsahta Press. "He’s concerned with finding social and spiritual meaning in the smallest moments of experience."

Poet Michael Palmer writes of Welkin, "Aaron McCollough has reclaimed (that is, radically reclaimed) a certain ancientness of praise and quest, credence and address, for our fractured present. The resulting poems resonate with a singular music, urgency, and substance."

McCollough holds degrees from the University of the South, North Carolina State University, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He was raised in Tennessee.

Ahsahta, Mandan Indian for "Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep," has produced 61 volumes over its 27 years of publishing, including books by such poets as Sandra Alcosser, David Baker, Linda Bierds, Katharine Coles, Wyn Cooper, Linda Dyer and Leo Romero.

The Sawtooth Poetry Prize, inaugurated in 2002, awards $1,500 for the best manuscript submitted to Ahsahta Press between Jan.1 and March 1 each year. The press is directed by Holmes, who also teaches poetry in Boise State’s MFA program.

Welkin is available at the BSU Bookstore, 1910 University Drive, Boise, ID 83725; from Small Press Distribution (http://www.spdbooks.org); or from Ahsahta Press at http://ahsahtapress.boisestate.edu/books/mccollough.htm .

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Welkin, by Aaron McCollough

ISBN 0-916272-72-4 paper

6" x 8" 118 pages price: $14.95

Janet Holmes, director, Ahsahta Press

English

208 426-2195

jholmes@boisestate.edu

Janelle Brown

communications and marketing

208 426-1790

jbrown2@boisestate.edu

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