Tuesday, June 28, 2005

Contact: Sarah Spence, 706-542-3839, litimag@uga.edu

LITERARY IMAGINATION, PRODUCED AT UGA, PUBLISHES 2005 PUSHCART PRIZE WINNER

Athens, Ga. – For the second time in three years, Literary Imagination will soon see one of its authors’ works recognized by the coveted Pushcart Prize. The publication, which is edited and produced at the University of Georgia by classics professor Sarah Spence, is the triquarterly review published by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics (ALSC).

“On the Reality of the Symbol,” a poem by Geoffrey Hill that appeared in the spring 2004 (6.2) issue of Literary Imagination, has been selected from among thousands of nominees in prose and poetry for reprint in Pushcart Prize XXX: Best of the Small Presses (2006), an annual anthology that, since 1975, has honored the best of American letters from small presses.

Hill, a University Professor and professor of literature and religion at Boston University who already distinguishes himself as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of both Keble College, Oxford, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and, in 2000, Tanner Lecturer at Brasenose College, Oxford, has received many literary awards, most recently the Cholmondeley Award of the Society of Authors, the Heinemann Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize of the Ingersoll Foundation. He is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry, most recently The Orchards of Syon (2002), Scenes from Comus (2005), and A Treatise of Civil Power (2005), and several books of criticism, including Style and Faith (2003). The prize-winning poem will be appearing in the author’s new collection, Without Title, to be published by Penguin Books (U.K.) in January 2006.

The Pushcart will not only recognize this noted author and scholar for his poem published in Literary Imagination but also appoint him to Pushcart’s editorial board for future anthologies.

“With the appearance, over the last few years, of his trilogy of book-length poems [The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech!, and The Orchards of Syon], and most recently, the appearance in the U.K. of Scenes from Comus, Geoffrey Hill continues to reshape the possibilities of the lyric poem and the lyric sequence,” said Rosanna Warren, poet and current president of the ALSC. “With a lexical range both broader and deeper than that of most poets in this new century or the last, with a self-punishing and restless quest for true utterance, and with grim historical conscience,” Warren noted, “Hill’s oeuvre imposes itself as unmistakable and masterful, a landmark in our landscape.”

ALSC is a gathering of scholars writers, critics, educators, journalists and others who seek to refocus literary studies on literature by bridging some of the gaps that have opened up in the literary world between creative writers and critics, between classical and modern scholarship, between regional and global studies, and between academic readers and the broader literate public. Each issue of Literary Imagination features a range of genres, including articles, essays, poetry, fiction and translation. Copies are available at bookstores, including Barnes & Noble Booksellers, by subscription, by contacting litimag@uga.edu <mailto:litimag@uga.edu> and by membership in the ALSC at www.bu.edu/literary