James Pollock, Ph.D., Professor of English at Loras College, has been named to the international shortlist of the £10,000 Manchester Poetry Prize, the U.K.’s largest poetry prize for unpublished work. The annual award, for a group of three to five poems, is organized by the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
The winner will be announced on February 28.
Dr. Pollock’s second book of poems, Durable Goods, is forthcoming from Véhicule Press in Montreal in 2022. According to Dr. Pollock, twenty-five of the poems from the manuscript have been published or accepted for publication in literary journals in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada, including Plume, Event, Geist, Magma, The Walrus, The Antigonish Review, The Humber Literary Review, Contemporary Verse 2, and Painted Bride Quarterly. One of these poems also won Magma Poetry’s £1,000 Editors’ Prize in 2020.
Dr. Pollock began teaching at Loras in 2002. He earned a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. He teaches poetry writing, advanced poetry writing, poetry in performance, Shakespeare, Canadian literature, modern and contemporary American poetry, and sometimes the senior thesis seminar in creative writing.
Dr. Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry, runner-up for the Posner Poetry Book Award, and winner of an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association; and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada, a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also editor of The Essential Daryl Hine, which made The Partisan‘s list of the best books of 2015.
The Manchester Writing Competition 2020 is the United Kingdom’s biggest award for unpublished writing. Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy launched the prizes in 2008.
More details on the Manchester Writing Competition, including Dr. Pollock’s submitted poems, can be found here.
You can find out more about Dr. Pollock at https://www.jamespollock.org/.
