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WELLESLEY, Mass. --
David
Ferry, Sophie
Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus at Wellesley
College, has been awarded the 2000 Rebekah Johnson
Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for his book,
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected
Poems and Translations (The University of
Chicago Press). The
Library of Congress
awards the biennial $10,000 prize "on behalf of the
nation" for the most distinguished book of poetry
written by an American and published during the
preceding two years. Ferry is the second
consecutive Wellesley faculty member to receive the
Bobbitt Prize; Frank Bidart was awarded the 1998
prize for his book, Desire (Farrar, Straus
& Giroux).
The prize is the
second national poetry award that Ferry has
garnered this year. Earlier this fall, he won the
Lenore
Marshall Poetry Prize
from the American Academy of Poets and The
Nation magazine. In addition to these awards,
Of No Country I Know has been awarded the
Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review
and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award
and the L.L.Winship/ PEN New England
Award.
A professor at
Wellesley from 1952-89, Ferry is a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In
September, he appeared with former US poet laureate
and former Wellesley professor Robert Pinsky at a
poetry reading as part of Wellesley's
125th anniversary
observances. Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1924,
Ferry attended Amherst College and Harvard
University, and served as a Sergeant in the United
States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946.
His previous books of
poetry and translation include The Eclogues
of Virgil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1999), The Odes of Horace: A Translation
(1998), Dwelling Places: Poems and
Translations (1993), Gilgamesh: A New
Rendering in English Verse (1992),
Strangers: A Book of Poems (1983), On
the Way to the Island (1960), and The
Limits of Mortality: An Essay on
Wordsworth's Major Poems (1959). His
Epistles of Horace: A Translation is
forthcoming in 2001 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Ferry's other awards
include the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of
American Poets, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the
Ingram Merrill Award and the William Arrowsmith
Translation Prize from AGNI magazine.
Ferry will be a
visiting lecturer in creative writing at Boston
University in the spring of 2001. He lives in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The prize is donated
by the family of the late Mrs. Bobbitt, the sister
of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who at one time
worked at the Library of Congress. Ferry is the
sixth poet to receive the award. Previous winners
of the Bobbitt Prize include Bidart, Kenneth Koch
for One Train (Knopf), A. R. Ammons
for Garbage (W.W. Norton), Louise Glück
for Ararat (The Ecco Press), and Mark Strand
for The Continuous Life (Knopf).
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