Jennifer Perrine has won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize for In the Human Zoo,
which, under the terms of the $1,000 award, will be published by the
University of Utah Press in the spring. The press sponsors the prize
with the university's English department. The prize honors the late poet
and teacher.
Judge Anne Winters, professor emerita of poetry at
the University of Illinois at Chicago, commented: "Jennifer Perrine's
poems, saturated in taut emotion and even in overt violence, are yet
cooled, disciplined, by rigorous rendering, carefully evoked locations
and descriptions. Jennifer Perrine is a deeply committed poet,
intelligent, intense and perceptive of the minutiae of inner and outer
human trauma."
Perrine's first book of poetry, The Body Is No Machine,
was published by New Issues and won the 2008 Devil's Kitchen Reading
Award in Poetry. She teaches creative writing and gender studies at
Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.