Gregory Mahrer and Nancy K. Pearson are the 2014-15 winners of the POL Prize and the Editor’s Prize, respectively. Their manuscripts—Mahrer’s A Provisional Map of the Lost Continent and Pearson’s The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone—will be published in the spring of 2016.

“As a reader, I am always looking to be surprised, to be transported by language,” said POL Co-Director and English Professor Elisabeth Frost, PhD, who serves as judge for the Editor’s Prize.

“I always return to Emily Dickinson’s famous description: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’ For me, these newest titles in the POL series do just that.”

Mahrer’s book, Frost said, presents a post-apocalyptic society in which the surviving humans must contend with ecological as well as philosophical concerns that emerge in their new world.

“The book stood out immediately for its originality of vision, as well as for the sheer beauty, line to line, of each poem,” she said. “This is not a work of science fiction—it’s more lyrical than that—but reading it, I felt completely immersed in another world.”

Pearson’s “eco-poetics,” meanwhile, addresses issues ranging from addiction to the imprint of slavery on the American landscape by situating the poem’s speaker in relation to the physical landscape, Frost said.

“The voice is personal, intimate, smart—just brilliant,” she said.

In addition to having their books published, Mahrer and Pearson received a prize of $1,000 each and will take part in Fordham’s annual “Voices Up!” performance, an event that commissions composers to set poems to music. Mahrer, Pearson, and the other performers will read their works at the concert on April 16, 2016 at the Lincoln Center campus.

Established in 1999, the POL book prize series selects an unpublished manuscript of poetry from hundreds of entries annually to be published by Fordham University Press. This year’s judge was John Yau, a poet and critic known for such works as The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry (University of Michigan Press, 2006) and Ing Rish (Saturnalia, 2005). The Editor’s Prize was added in 2010.

“These days it’s difficult to get poetry published, let alone really noticed,” Frost said. “Even university presses are under such financial constraints that the number of really good presses with poetry series is diminishing all the time. Contests like the POL Prizes allow the work to be not just published, but distributed.”

This year’s finalists were:

• L. Conrad, A World In Which
• Purvi Shah, Miracle Marks
• Jennifer Willoughby, Beautiful Zero
• Michael Snediker, The New York Editions

Amy Sara Carroll, Ph.D., assistant professor of English at the University of Michigan, received the 2012 POL Prize for her book of poetry, Fannie + Freddie / The Sentimentality of Post-9-11 Pornography (Fordham University Press, 2013). The 2012 POL Editor’s Prize went to Nicolas Hundley, director of communications for the University of Texas at Austin, for his book The Revolver in the Hive (Fordham University Press, 2013).

Carroll and Hundley read excerpts from their prize-winning books on March 26 at the Lincoln Center campus and were introduced by Evie Shockley, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Rutgers University, who also read from her work.

“We’re looking for the best and most interesting work that’s being done,” said Elisabeth Frost, Ph.D., associate professor of English, director and editor of thebook prize series.

“At the time I started this project, it felt as though the publishing world was divided into schools or approaches, so a given book series might be known for publishing very experimental work, or personal, confessional work, or whatever it might be,” she said. “But there’s not one agenda to the [POL] series. What we’re looking for is fantastic, innovative writing, and not one particular quality over another.”

Innovation, she said, was what stood out in both Carroll’s and Hundley’s books. Carroll’s Fannie + Freddie is an “unbelievably brave book,” Frost said, not only because of its unique overlay of text and images throughout the piece, but also because of its approach both to tough social issues such as the recession and to personal hardship in the poet’s life.

Hundley’s book, meanwhile, takes a quieter approach, Frost said. Marked by subtlety and intimacy, The Revolver in the Hive deals with grief that is both personal and social as it weaves together the story of a father’s death with the gradual destruction of a landscape.

Established in 1999, the POL book prize series selects an unpublished manuscript of poetry from hundreds of entries annually to be published by Fordham University Press. This year’s judge was poet Claudia Rankine, author of the poetry collection Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf, 2004). The Editor’s Prize, for which Frost serves as judge each year, was added in 2010.

On Monday, Sept. 12, Fordham’s Poets Out Loud will launch its new season with a New York City-themed reading by poets Patricia Spears Jones and Edwin Torres.

Spears Jones, co-editor for Ordinary Women: Poems of New York City Women, was born and raised in Arkansas. She moved to New York City in the mid-1970s and has actively participated in the city’s poetry and theatre communities, notably as former program coordinator for the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church.

Edwin Torres, a first-generation Puerto Rican who grew up in New York City, got his start in the 1990s at the Lower East Side’s Nuyorican Poets Café, where he created the “Poets Neurotica,” dance-poetry-music performances. He has been featured in Rolling Stone Magazine, New York Magazine and on PBS’ Charlie Rose. His work mingles poetry with theatre, music, sound and physical improvisation.

The readings are free and open to the public. They start at 7 p.m. on Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, in the Lowenstein Center 12th Floor Lounge.

POL was founded in 1992 by faculty, students and alumni to offer a series of poetry readings in the Lincoln Center area. Later this year, POL will stage a 20th year anniversary reading in the Lowenstein atrium.