Congratulations to ASLE member Derek Sheffield, winner of the 2019 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize (Established) for his collection Not for Luck. Selected by judge Mark Doty, Not for Luck will be published in 2021 by the MSU Press.

“In Not for Luck, Derek Sheffield achieves something of inestimable value: a trustworthy, convincing voice,” writes judge Mark Doty. “A voice, of course, is something we have, but getting it onto the page is another matter entirely. We don’t speak in the compressed mode of lyric poetry, even of a colloquial kind, and yet there’s something deeply affecting about a poetic voice that sounds effortless, and captures something essential about a speaker. It allows us, over the course of a book of poems, to feel that we’ve met someone in particular. Not for Luck introduces us to a father, a friend, a son, a man deeply embedded in family and community, which is also to say he is a citizen of time, and attentive to passages, growth and change.”

Derek Sheffield’s collections include A Revised Account of the West (Flyway, 2006), winner of the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award, and Through the Second Skin (Orchises, 2013), finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the recipient of the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee and fellowships from Artist Trust and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and The Georgia Review. He is the poetry editor of Terrain.org and, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, editor of the anthology Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy (Trinity, 2020). He lives with his family in central Washington where he teaches English at Wenatchee Valley College.

This post comes from the announcement at the Michigan State University Poetry Center page:

https://poetry.rcah.msu.edu/wheelbarrow-books/previous-winners.html