Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Patricia Hooper Wins 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award


  Patricia Hooper, of Gastonia, North Carolina, has been selected as winner of the 2015 Anita Claire Scharf Award by the editors of Tampa Review. Her new poetry manuscript, Separate Flights, will be published in 2016 by the University of Tampa Press and the poet will be invited to read on the University of Tampa campus after the book is published next year. 
The Anita Claire Scharf Award is given to support publication of a book of poetry submitted to the annual Tampa Review Prize competition that speaks to aspects of the journal’s mission to praise and celebrate the beauty and diversity of the natural world; to illuminate the interconnectedness of our global environment; and to affirm the interrelatedness of visual and verbal art. The award is named in honor of Anita Scharf, the founding editorial assistant, and later associate and contributing editor, of Tampa Review who helped define the aesthetic and global values that are part of the journal’s mission. 
“Patricia Hooper’s collection quite literally lifts off,” said Richard Mathews, editor of Tampa Review, who worked with Scharf on the journal for more than seventeen years. “Anita always stressed the importance of enlarging awareness, stretching for a larger vision. This brilliant and lyrical manuscript uses metaphors of flight—including birds and planes and art— to explore and express the larger vision. And as a dedicated bird-watcher, Anita would also have appreciated each species Hooper introduces—and she would have loved the varieties of flight that she includes.” 
Patricia Hooper is the author of three previous books of poetry: Other Lives (Elizabeth Street Prees, 1984), At the Corner of the Eye (Michigan State University Press, 1997), and Aristotle’s Garden (Bluestem Press/Emporia State University, 2004).  She is also the author of a chapbook, The Flowering Trees, (State Street Press, 1995) and four children's books. Her poetry has appeared in many magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The American Scholar, Poetry, The Hudson Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and The Kenyon Review.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, where she earned BA and MA degrees, Hooper has been the recipient of The Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, The Bluestem Award for Poetry, a Writer’s Community Residency Award from the National Writer’s Voice, and the Laurence Goldstein Award for Poetry from Michigan Quarterly Review.
“This manuscript is musical and powerful in its impact—virtually symphonic in its shape and scope,” Mathews adds.  “From early poems like “Flying to Nantucket” and “The Heron at Wild Oak Bay” to later complex and layered works like “Monet Paints the Willows” and “Telling Time,” this beautifully structured manuscript is one that Anita would have cheered at every turn.  We are looking forward to sharing it with a broad spectrum of readers.” 
The Anita Claire Scharf Award is selected by the editors of Tampa Review from among the manuscripts submitted to the annual prize competition. Submissions for next year’s awards are now being accepted. 
To be eligible, authors are asked to submit a previously unpublished booklength manuscript. Judging is by the editors of Tampa Review, who are members of the faculty at the University of Tampa. There is a contest fee of $25, but each submitter receives a complimentary one-year subscription to Tampa Review. Entries must follow published guidelines and must be postmarked by December 31, 2015. All entries will be considered for both the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry and the Anita Claire Scharf Award.
Complete guidelines are available at www.ut.edu/tampareview or by sending a self-addressed, stamped envelope to The Tampa Review Prizes, University of Tampa Press, 401 West Kennedy Blvd., Tampa, FL 33606.