Poet Eduardo C. Corral Selected for Prestigious Award
Eduardo C. Corral, recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University. Photo © Matt Valentine
Poet Eduardo C. Corral has been selected as the latest recipient of the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes National Poetry Prize awarded by the Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Creative Writing at Princeton University.
The Holmes National Poetry Prize was established in memory of Princeton 1951 alumnus Theodore H. Holmes and is presented each year to a poet of special merit as selected by the faculty of the Creative Writing Program, which includes writers Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Paul Muldoon, James Richardson, Tracy K. Smith, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Susan Wheeler, and Edmund White. The award currently carries a prize of $5,000 and was first made to Mark Doty in 2011 and has since also been awarded to Evie Shockley, Natalie Diaz and Matt Rasmussen.
Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, which won the 2011 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2012, Beloit Poetry Journal, Huizache, Jubilat, New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, and Quarterly West. He is a CantoMundo fellow and the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has also been awarded a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from Poetry, and residencies to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. He has served as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Creative Writing at Colgate University and as the Philip Roth Resident in Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Corral teaches in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Pacific University.
Corral recently read at Princeton along with four seniors in the Creative Writing Program through a series hosted by the seniors in the program. The Emerging Writers Reading Series is intended to present a public showcase for the work of the thesis students and give the senior class the opportunity to read with and learn from established writers they admire.
“Eduardo C. Corral is a poet of astonishing craft and huge consciousness,” notes Tracy K. Smith, Director of the Program in Creative Writing. “His growing body of work fashions a moving lyric portrait of masculinity, legacy, and justice. We are delighted that the Holmes Prize allows us to honor and support the work of such a promising young poet.”
