Dispatches | February 14, 2008

Somehow we’ve neglected to raise a fuss yet over the fact that Paul Guest, one of the poets appearing in our current issue, very recently won a prestigious Whiting Writers’ Award, which currently comes with a sturdy cash prize of $50,000. Since 1985 it’s been awarded annually to ten emerging writers of promise, in a handful of genres. Past Whiting Award recipients include Jorie Graham, Denis Johnson, Hayden Carruth, Mark Doty, Mona Simpson, Michael Cunningham, Major Jackson, and others. In our Winter 2007 issue, we published Guest’s long, associative, slightly daft poem, “My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge,” which, I was tickled to discover this week, is the tentative title poem of his third collection, due out with Ecco Books in 2009. His previous two collections include The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World (New Issues Prize in Poetry, 2002) and My Body Double (Prairie Schooner Book Prize, 2006). We extend Paul our heartiest, if semi-belated, congratulations.