In the Empire State is Poets House. Each spring, this national poetry library founded in 1985 by Stanley Kunitz and with currently over 50,000 volumes of poetry puts on annual showcase. This year, they temporarily housed the showcase in the New York Public Library at Jefferson Market. Annually The Word Works has participated in this showcase of new books added to the Poets House collection.

This year Karren Alenier attended the showcase with Word Works book designer Janice Olson. Each of the

 five books we exhibited were designed by Janice.




Book titles in this showcase were: Call from Paris by Prartho Sereno, Green Bodies by Rosemary Winslow, The Hat City After Men Stopped Wearing Hats by John Suroweicki, Mary Falls: Requiem for Mrs. Surratt, Whiskey in the Garden of Eden by Sarah Browning,

2006 Washington Prize Winner Receives Verse Drama Prize from The Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation has announced that John Surowiecki is the inaugural recipient of the Verse Drama Prize of $10,000, honoring a living poet who has written a previously unpublished, outstanding original verse drama in English. In addition to the cash prize, the winning manuscript will be presented as a staged reading in New York and Chicago in 2008. The Verse Drama Prize brings renewed attention to an under-recognized area of poetry and encourages poets to work in a new genre, thereby bringing fresh life to the art.

Surowiecki is the author of two poetry collections, Watching Cartoons before Attending a Funeral (White Pine Press, 2003) and The Hat City after Men Stopped Wearing Hats (The Word Works, 2006 Washington Prize), and five chapbooks. My Nose and Me: (A TragedyLite or TragiDelight in 33 Scenes) is his first piece written for the stage.

In 2005, Surowiecki was awarded a poetry fellowship from the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism, Office of the Arts. He is a freelance writer and teaches poetry courses at Manchester Community College. His poems have recently appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Common Ground Review, Connecticut Review, Margie, Nimrod, and Poetry.