Finalists Announced for
1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; $10,000 Award for Most Outstanding Book of Poetry

New York, September 11, 1995 -The Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine today announced the finalists for the 1995 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a $10,000 award for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States in I 1994. The finalists are:

• Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, by Cyrus Cassels (Copper Canyon)
• Green Notebook, Winter Road, by Jane Cooper (Tillbury House)
• Winter Numbers, by Marilyn Hacker (W. W. Norton)
• Firekeeper, by Pattiann Rogers (Milkweed Editions)
• Flamingo Watching, by Kay Ryan (Copper Beach)

The winner of the prize will be announced in October. The judges for this year's contest contest are Cornelius Eady, Alice Fulton, and Maxine Kunin. An essay by Maxine Kumin on the prize-winning book will appear in a fall issue of The Nation, along with a selection of poems from the book.

The previous winners of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize are Cid Corman, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, Allen Tate, Hayden Carruth, Sterling A. Brown, John Logan, George Starbuck, Josephine Miles, John Ashbery, Howard Moss, Donald Hall, Josephine Jacobsen, Thomas McGrath, Michael Ryan, John Haines, Adrienne Rich, Thom Gunn, and W. S. Merwin.

The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize was established in 1975 by the New Hope Foundation in memory of Lenore Marshall (1897-1971), a poet, novelist, essayist, and political activist. Lenore Marshall was the author of three novels, three books of poetry, a collection of short stories, and selections from her notebooks. Her work also appeared in The New Yorker, The Saturday Review, Partisan Review, and other literary magazines. In 1956 she helped found the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, the citizens' organization that lobbied successfully for passage of the 1963 partial nuclear test ban treaty. The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is endowed by a gift to the Academy from the New Hope Foundation.

The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. The largest organization in the country dedicated specifically to the art of poetry, the Academy sponsors programs nationally. In addition to the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, these include the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement; the Tanning Prize, the largest annual literary award in the United States; the James Laughlin Award; the Wilt Whitman Award; the Raiziss/de Palchi Translation Award; the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award; poetry prizes at 150 colleges and universities; and the American Poets Fund and the Atlas Fund, which provide financial assistance to poets and non-commercial publishers of poetry, respectively. The Academy also sponsors a series of public readings and symposia that began in New York City in 1963 and is now presented in several cities across the country.

The Nation, founded in 1865, is America's oldest weekly magazine. Well known as a journal of political analysis, The Nation also has a long and distinguished literary history. Such notable writers as Henry James, William James, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and James Russell Lowell were among its original contributors. Many poets have contributed to its pages, including T S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, and Robert Lowell. Each year the magazine and the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y co-sponsor "Discovery"/TheNation, an award for younger poets. The Nation first joined with the New Hope Foundation to present the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1982.

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