Leah Naomi Green has won the 2019 Walt Whitman Award for her manuscript, The More Extravagant Feast, which will be published by Graywolf Press in April 2020.
Besides publication of her poetry, Green receives a six-week all-expenses-paid residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, as well as $5,000, and the Academy of American Poets will purchase and send thousands of copies of the book to its members and feature her on Poets.org and in American Poets magazine.
Judge Li-Young Lee said the manuscript for The More Extravagant Feast "keeps faithful company with the world and earns its name. The darkness and suffering of living on earth are assumed in this work, woven throughout the fabric of its lineated perceptions and insights, and yet it is ultimately informed by the deep logic of compassion (is there a deeper human logic?) and enacts the wisdom of desire and fecundity reconciled with knowledge of death and boundedness. These poems remind us that when language is used to mediate between a soul's inner contents and the outer world's over-abundance of being and competing meanings, it's possible to both transcend the nihilism of word games, thereby discovering a more meaningful destiny for language, as well as reveal the body of splendor which is Existence."
Green received an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of The Ones We Have, which received the 2012 Flying Trout Chapbook Prize. She is associate editor of Shenandoah, and her poems have appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, Ecotone, and Pleiades. She teaches at Washington and Lee University.
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Elly McCausland and Dan Saladino were named co-winners of the £2,000 (about $2,640) Jane Grigson Trust Award, "marking the first time the judges have decided to award the prize to two shortlisted authors," the Bookseller reported. The prize was created in memory of the British food writer to recognize a debut author of a book about food or drink that has been commissioned, but not yet published.
McCausland won for The Botanical Kitchen, which chair of judges Geraldene Holt called "a very well-researched book taking a refreshing view of cooking with seeds and spices, leaves and flowers of familiar and also little-known ingredients. She brings these flavors into focus in a totally delicious way."
Saladino shared the honors for his book The Ark of Taste, which Holt said "examines the quiet tragedy of endangered foods. He asks important questions about how and why this is happening and inspires us to act. His book is an eloquent cry for action."
Selina Periampillai was named runner-up for The Island Kitchen.
Holt added that the "field of applications was the strongest we've yet received, with an amazingly wide variety of subjects and treatments, and the decision of who should be the final winner was incredibly difficult to make. The judges have therefore decided that, with such talented entrants, the award should be made to two authors who between them exemplify the best of modern food writing."