In the summer of 2009, Frank and Helene Crohn generously provided the National Poetry Foundation (now the Center for Poetry and Poetics) at the University of Maine with the means to establish an Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize for Poetry. The Millay Prize seeks to reward achievement in poetry at a crucial, early stage in a writer’s development while commemorating the legacy of one of Maine’s best known and most loved poets, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who herself received the gift of an education at Vassar College in part through the generosity of Caroline B. Dow.
The external judge for the 2021 award was Rae Armantrout. The author of more than ten collections of poetry, Armantrout has also published a short memoir, True (1998). Her Collected Prose was published in 2007. Her most recent collections include Finalists (2022); Conjure (2020); Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award; Itself (2015); Partly: New and Selected Poems (2016); Entanglements (2017); and Wobble (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award. A keynote performer in the NPF’s conference on The Poetry of the 1970s in 2010, Armantrout also read in the New Writing Series in the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2002.
Armantrout selected the following manuscripts for the 2021 Millay Prize:
- First prize to Adam Ray Wagner for “Faces and Forms”
- Second prize to Christopher Thomas for “He Dreams Footnotes”
The celebration originally planned for fall of 2021 will take place on Friday, April 29, 2022 beginning at 4:30pm ET via Zoom (request link at english.chair@maine.edu).