Poet Linda Gregg wins $50,000 prize

NEW YORK – Poet Linda Gregg has won the third annual Jackson Poetry Prize, a $50,000 award given to an author who has written at least one book of "recognized literary merit," but has yet to receive wide attention.

Gregg, 66, is the author of several books, including "All of It Singing" and "Things and Flesh." The award is sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc., a nonprofit literary organization that announced the prize Tuesday.

Previous winners include Tony Hoagland and Elizabeth Alexander, who read an original work at President Obama's inauguration in January.





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The Resurrection




Let the tower in your city burn. Let the steps
to the shadowed building by the lake burn
even though it is made of stone. Let the lion
house burn so that the roaring and burning
will be heard together. Let the old, poor,
wooden house where I lived go up in flames, even though
you returned and sat on the steps that led
up to where we used to exist. Let it all burn,
not to destroy them, but to give them the life
my life gives to them now. To make them flare
as they do in me, bright and hot, bright and burning.



Linda Gregg

Linda Gregg was born in Suffern, New York, and grew up in Marin County, California. She received her B.A. and M.A. from San Francisco State University.

Her first book of poems, Too Bright to See, was published in 1981. Since then, she has published several collections of poetry, most recently In the Middle Distance (Graywolf Press, 2006), Things and Flesh (1999), Chosen by the Lion (1994), The Sacraments of Desire (1991), Alma (1985), and Eight Poems (1982).

About Gregg's work, the poet W. S. Merwin has said, "I have loved Linda Gregg's poems since I first read them. They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance."

Gregg's honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Whiting Writer's Award, as well as multiple Pushcart Prizes. She was the 2003 winner of the Sara Teasdale Award and the 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry.

She has taught at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, and the University of California at Berkeley. She currently lives in New York and teaches at Princeton University.

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