English Department News

Columbia Poetry Mags Win 2009 Illinois Arts Council Awards

Both poetry magazines published by the Columbia College Chicago English Department are among the recipients of this year’s Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards.  The award recognizes outstanding writing in Illinois nonprofit literary magazines.

Court Green was honored for "Sylvia Plath at the Aviary" by Jenny Mueller, Ph.D., which appeared in issue No. 5. This is the second consecutive year Court Green has won an IAC Literary Award. Dr. Mueller is an assistant professor of English at McKendree University in Lebanon, Ill.

Columbia Poetry Review won an IAC Literary Award for the poem "Postcard Written at 'The Perfect Cup'" by Robert McDonald, which appeared in issue No. 21. McDonald, who lives in Chicago, also is the co-author of A Field Guide to Gay and Lesbian Chicago with Kathie Bergquist (BA’05; MFA ‘09)

"Everyone affiliated with the English Department at Columbia College Chicago is so pleased the Illinois Arts Council chose to recognize our outstanding poetry journals and these two very talented authors," said Tony Trigilio, Director, Creative Writing – Poetry, and Associate Chair, English Department, at Columbia. "This kind of honor inspires us to do the best work we can and continue introducing the best in poetry to as wide an audience as possible.”

Both Columbia magazines, as well as the two authors, each will receive $1,000. The awards were judged this year by J. Allyn Rosser of Athens, Ohio; Thaddeus Rutkowski of New York City; and Michelle Wildgen of Madison, Wisconsin.

Court Green is a poetry journal published annually in association with the English Department at Columbia College Chicago and is edited by Lisa Fishman, Arielle Greenberg, Tony Trigilio and David Trinidad. It is named for the property in Devon, England, where Sylvia Plath lived and where she wrote the Ariel poems. Each issue features a dossier on a special topic or theme; Plath was the theme of the honored issue and poem.

Columbia Poetry Review is an annual, nationally distributed literary journal, edited by both graduate and undergraduate students. Besides McDonald’s award-winning poem, recent issues contain the works of such poets as Denise Duhamel, Kimiko Hahn, Matthea Harvey, Timothy Liu, Alice Notley, D.A. Powell, Ed Roberson, Rosemarie Waldrop and Rachel Zucker, as well as the best Columbia College student writing and unsolicited work submitted to the review. For more information or to order copies, visit http://english.colum.edu/cpr.