January 21, 2010
Poet Laureate Chooses Jill McDonough and Atsuro Riley For 13th Annual Witter Bynner Award and Reading, Feb. 18
Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has chosen two talented voices in poetry, Jill McDonough and Atsuro Riley, for the 2010 Witter Bynner Fellowships, and will introduce the poets on Feb. 18 at the Library of Congress.
McDonough, from Boston, and Riley, from the San Francisco Bay area, will read their poems at 6:45 p.m., Thursday, Feb. 18, in the Mumford Room on the sixth floor of the James Madison Building, 101 Independence Ave., S.E., Washington, D.C. The event is free and open to the public; tickets are not required.
McDonough and Riley each will receive a $7,500 fellowship, provided by the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry in conjunction with the Library of Congress. This is the 13th year the fellowships have been awarded.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said, “These fellowships — to poets whose distinctive talents and craftsmanship merit wider recognition — provide a wonderful way for the Laureate, the Library and the Witter Bynner Foundation to encourage poets and poetry.”
McDonough’s recent work, “Habeas Corpus” (2008), is a collection of 50 sonnets, each one about a legal execution from 1608 to 2005. Ryan said McDonough’s “understated, elegant writing in ‘Habeas Corpus’ brings to narrative and description such a clean dignity that a book about executions achieves something nigh on impossible: histories of injectings, hangings and burnings wind up not sensational but mysterious. The poems are egoless.”
Ryan continued, “McDonough writes sonnets that are subtle in their art and clear in their object. They are quiet, like natural-history dioramas, where we understand what a miracle life was — by its having been taken.”
