WINNER ANNOUNCED FOR THE 2018 SUNKEN GARDEN POETRY PRIZE

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Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that Major Jackson has selected Chaun Ballard as the winner of the 2018 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize!

Chaun Ballard will be reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival on July 11, 2018.  For details, see our Calendar.

Flight by Chaun Ballard

Chaun Ballard was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, and San Bernardino, California, and has an MFA from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. For eight years now, he and his wife have been teaching in the Middle East and West Africa. Chaun Ballard’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in ANMLY (FKA Drunken Boat), Columbia Poetry Review, Frontier Poetry, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Rattle, and other literary magazines. His work has received nominations for both Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize.

 

The poems in Flight unspool a rich and charmed history of survival into songs that celebrate the miracle of endurance in a country defined by the peculiar phenomenon of race; many of the poems in this collection explore (or allude to) the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson with a brilliance that is underscored by the poets’ extraordinary sense of sound to etch a new reality in our ears. Here the poet employs the perennial powers of poetic forms (pantoum, ghazals, and sonnets, not to mention the Stevens imitation of 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird) to refresh staid conversations and to lyrically give voice to the good fortune of travel and language. Whether reveling in having reached middle-age or recalling that fateful day, September 11th, Flight issues its own battle cry and imaginatively addresses one of the great complexities of our time.

—Judge’s Citation by Major Jackson

Finalists

Symptoms by Nava EtShalom
Adoption by Adam Falkner
Dislocated Cities by Lisa Hiton
Speyer by Lisa Hiton
Where’s The Heat by Maggie Millner
Subnivean by Emily Pittinos
One Sentence To Save in a Cataclysm by Stephanie Strickland
Hallelujah in a Dead Tongue by Mark Wagenaar
What Follows by H.R. Webster

Semifinalists

In the Herald of Improbable Fortunes by Robert Campbell
Desert Selkie by Avra Elliott
Year of the Girl by Karen Harryman
The Old Works by Whittney Jones
Sublingual by Joan Kane
Big Man by Michael Marberry
Sympathy by Dusty Neu
Respira by Valorie Ruiz
This Late Hour by Joe Wilkins
The Escapist: Poems by Marco Yan

We’d like to recognize and thank so very appreciatively our extraordinary panel of preliminary readers: Maureen Alsop, Claudia Cortese, Noah Falck, Toby Martinez de las Rivas, Michael Robins, Henk Rossouw, Shelly Taylor, and Allison Titus.

 

One Million Visitors

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Will you be the visitor who makes history?

After 70 years as a world-class art and history museum in Farmington, Hill-Stead is expecting to welcome its 1,000,000th visitor during mid-December. Come to Hill-Stead during the next few weeks and find out if you win our special commemorative “Theodate Mug” designed exclusively for the milestone event!

If you have ever wanted to visit this magical place, now is a perfect time. The historic house is all decked out with holiday decorations and delightful trimmings around every corner. December is also the last month to view the fabulous Broadway costume exhibition: From Page to Stage: Broadway Costumes from the Goodspeed Musicals Collection.

This holiday season, we welcome all visitors to experience all that the Hill-Stead has to offer. Explore the grounds, take a tour of the house, tour our special Broadway costume exhibition, and experience the gift left to us all by our beloved Theodate Pope Riddle.

Save the Stone Wall

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Donate Now
The beautiful landscape of Farmington’s Hill-Stead is defined by its iconic stone walls. The walls were built from area basalt and trap rock, as well as stones from the farms that had previously been on the property.

A part of the stone wall surrounding the Sunken Garden will soon be in need of some critical care and must be rebuilt.

We are looking for $50 from 300 heroes to meet a $15,000 goal to help fund this essential repair.

  • Every donation will be used to support the stone wall restoration.
  • Please make a gift today, and thank you for helping to preserve the stone walls of Hill-Stead.

A New Pollinator Garden at Hill-Stead

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By Lea Anne Moran, Garden Manager

What is a pollinator garden, you might ask? Aren’t all gardens good for pollinators? It’s nice to think that, but it’s not necessarily so.

Pollinator Garden at Hill-Stead

A honey bee on the heirloom garden heliotrope in the Sunken Garden.

For the past three decades, visitors to Hill-Stead Museum have grown to love and appreciate the scenic historic Sunken Garden, easily viewed from the top of the steps. Those who venture down are often surprised to see the multitude of bees, butterflies, birds, and moths enjoying themselves among the plants. There are some plants in the garden that the bees just love: the many varieties of purple and blue salvia are among their favorites. Some they like to look at, but not touch, like the pink and white Japanese anemone. I’ve watched bees hover and dance around these pretty, bouncing flowers, but after a look or maybe a sniff, they fly on to the next bed for a tastier treat.

So then, what is a pollinator garden? It is one that contains plants that provide nectar and pollen for pollinators, and offers a place for them to
call home. Master Gardener interns and graduates have been hard at work planning a new pollinator garden on the museum grounds that will serve this purpose. Not only will it be a habitat and food source for bees, butterflies and others, it will be a beautiful and colorful garden for visitors to explore. And the best thing is that it will make use of a long-forgotten space that was once a productive greenhouse for the Pope and Riddle families. At its peak, it was filled with bedding plants grown from seed for the gardens on the property and provided plants and blooms for the home. What better way to use the space than to fill it once again with beautiful blooms, climbing vines and flowering shrubs?

Pollinator Garden at Hill-Stead

An early image of one of three greenhouses on the Hill-Stead grounds.

The old stone foundation of the greenhouse still stands strong but has been overgrown with vines, poison ivy and tree seedlings. It is tucked behind the stone garage, the low stone building facing the Pope house that you drive past to get to the parking lot. You can get to these “ruins” through a vine-covered opening in the high stone wall at the southeast side of the Sunken Garden. Only the curious have ventured there in the past, but it will soon be the home of a bountiful, colorful garden for visitors to explore and appreciate.

 

Pollinator Garden at Hill-Stead

Master gardeners hard at work laying the cardboard and landscape fabric over the poison ivy and other weeds.

This past year, a team of Master Gardener interns led by Lora Madorin, Susan Caron and Lea Anne Moran developed a plan for the space. They considered carefully the historic aspect of the site, and their research for plant material included studying invoices found in the archives for plants that would have been grown there. They scoured the long lists of pollinator-friendly plants currently available on the market and have put together a “wish list.”

Clearing the land has been the biggest hurdle. The area was filled with poison ivy that had to be addressed first. Several options were considered, and in the end, layers of landscape fabric and cardboard were laid as a first line of defense. This spring, the group assessed the area and began soil preparation.

The Master Gardeners are seeking plant donations and have many ideas for future educational programs. Keep an eye out for updates on this revitalized outdoor space at Hill-Stead.

Emily Jungmin Yoon chosen as winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize

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Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that Maggie Smith has chosen Ordinary Misfortunes by Emily Jungmin Yoon of Chicago, Illinois, as winner of the 2017 Sunken Garden Chapbook Poetry Prize.

Emily will perform her work in at Hill-Stead’s Sunken Garden Poetry Festival on Wednesday, July 19.  For tickets, visit Sunken Garden Poetry Festival 2017.

I’m completely taken in by these poems, how they deftly balance lyric and narrative, history and the present, body and mind. These are poems of violence–against women, and against Korean women in particular–but they are also poems about the pain and pleasure in language itself: ‘pear in Korean is a homonym for ship or boat’; ‘A homonym for apple is apology.’ Ordinary Misfortunes is a remarkable collection.
—Maggi Smith

 

Emily Jungmin Yoon‘s poems and translations appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Offing, The Literary Review, and elsewhere. For her poetry, she has received awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, The Home School in Miami, the Aspen Institute, New York University, and the University of Chicago. She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is a PhD student in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department at the University of Chicago.