University Times

Tennessee author Bobby C. Rogers is the 2009 winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, awarded by the University of Pittsburgh Press for an outstanding first full-length book of poetry. His collection, “Paper Anniversary,” was selected from more than 700 entries and will be published by the Press in fall 2010.

Rogers is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Union University in Jackson, Tenn. His poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Greensboro Review, Image, Epoch, Puerto del Sol, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Southwest Review, Sou’wester, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Southern Humanities Review, Washington Square and Meridian. He has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and he won the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry for 2002.

Describing his work, Rogers explained, “I hope my collection of poems, in some small way, does honor to the work of Whitman and Dickinson, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Penn Warren, the stories and voices I heard on my grandparents’ porch, the language of the public school playground, the ball field chatter and work site rhythms I grew up with,” he said. “The book of Ecclesiastes and the epistle of James, the prose of Peter Taylor and John Cheever and Flannery O’Connor and James Agee — these and other writers have set up shop in my head.”

This year’s Starrett prize judge was Ed Ochester, Pitt Poetry Series editor.

Established in 1981, the Starrett prize, named for the Press’s first director, carries a $5,000 award and publication in the Press’s poetry series.