New London, CT, January 15, 2025 - Holly Karapetkova Wins 2025 William Meredith Prize for Poetry
The 2025 Meredith Award for Poetry is presented to Holly Karapetkova for her third book of poems, "DEAR EMPIRE," to be published January 20, 2025 by Gunpowder Press. "DEAR EMPIRE" is the co-winner of the 2024 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize.
Grace Cavalieri, Foundation Board Member and Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate, writes, “If there is a time capsule, please let it have Holly Karapetkova’s Dear Empire securely placed to show—those who may come after us—that we were a decent people, with morals, insight, the gift of beauty, language and heart; that we cared for one another, and suffered when others did not. And if by then—someone found the meaning of 'soul,' they can hark back to this book as one of the gates that opened to it.”
Poet David Keplinger says Karapetkova has “written a tour de force: a tender but deeply candid volume which seeks to de-colonize not the country but the self…” Noted poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller speaks of Karapetkova’s “contagious honesty. Her poems describe an American mirror we should not turn away from.”
A Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virgina, Karpetkova won a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship and is the author of two books of poetry, Words We Might One Day Say, winner of the 2010 Washington Writers’ Publishing House Poetry Award, and Towline, winner of the 2016 Vern Rutsala Poetry Contest from Cloudbank Books. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from Georgia State University and a doctorate in Comparative Literature and English from the University of Cincinnati.
William Meredith, whose name graces this award, was a member of the Academy of American Poets. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for his 1987 collection, Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems. Recent Meredith Award recipients include Natasha Trethewey, Kathi Wolf, Tom Kirlin, Robert Earl Price and Anne Harding Woodworth.
Contact
William Meredith Foundation
Richard Harteis
860-961-5138
www.poets-choice.com
www.WilliamMeredithFoundation.org
poets-choice.com
"DEAR EMPIRE" is available through www.gunpowderpress.com, Amazon.com, internet bookstores and from the publisher at www.gunpowderpress.com.
Contact
William Meredith Foundation
Richard Harteis
860-961-5138
www.poets-choice.com
www.WilliamMeredithFoundation.org
Art@zenithgallery.com
