Noah Warren Named 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets Winner

February 19, 2015

Yale College graduate Noah Warren ’11 has been named the 2015 Yale Younger Poet. His manuscript, “The Destroyer in the Glass,” was chosen from among over 500 entries by the prize-winning poet Carl Phillips, judge of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize competition.

Of the manuscript, Phillips says: “ ‘The Destroyer in the Glass’ impresses at once with its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self. The poems both examine and embody the nexus of joy and sorrow, of certainty and confusion, without which there’d be none of the restlessness that makes us uniquely human. Warren’s vision is a generous one indeed —and itself a gift.”

Yale University Press will publish “The Destroyer in the Glass” in April 2016. The manuscript is Phillips’s fifth selection as judge and the 110th volume in the series. Phillips’s fourth selection, Ansel Elkins’s “Blue Yodel,”will be published by Yale University Press on March 31, 2015.

Warren was born in Nova Scotia and grew up in Charlestown, Rhode Island. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, before coming to Yale, where he was awarded the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship, funding a year of writing and travel. He has taught English in preparatory schools, and now lives in New Orleans. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and AGNI.

Awarded since 1919 by Yale University Press, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the most prominent new American poets by bringing the work of these artists to the attention of the larger public. Earlier winners of the prize include such talents as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine, and Robert Hass. It is the longest-running poetry prize in the United States.

Yale University Press will also continue its partnership with The James Merrill House. Winners of the series will receive one of the five writing fellowships offered at The James Merrill House in Stonington, Connecticut. The fellowship provides a furnished living space and daily access to James Merrill’s apartment for a writer in search of a quiet setting to complete a project of literary or academic merit.

Two of Warren’s poems, “Across from the Winter Palace” and “Barcelona: Implication,” can be read on the Poetry Foundation website.

Source:  Yale News http://news.yale.edu/2015/02/18/alumnus-noah-warren-11-named-yale-younger-poet

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