Stephen Burt Wins 2002
Warren/Brooks Award
March 21, 2003
Bowling Green, Ky. - A teacher of contemporary American literature at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., is the eighth recipient of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism for 2002 from the Center for Robert Penn Warren Studies at Western Kentucky University.
Dr. Stephen Burt will receive the award for "Randall Jarrell and His Age," a nearly 300-page work facilitating a better understanding of Jarrell's total literary achievement. It covers Jarrell's critical essays, his comic novel "Pictures from an Institution," and his poetry.
In making its selection, the three-member jury wrote that "Randall Jarrell and His Age" is a "remarkably learned, judicious and penetrating study of its subject that is rendered in an engaging style which is clear, concise, relatively jargon-free, not over-wrought and concentrated". In the end, Burt's book does what both Warren and Brooks insisted good criticism should do: It sends us back to the poetry with new eyes and renewed interest."
Dr. Burt received his doctorate from Yale University in 2000. He published a book of poetry, "Popular Music," which won the Colorado Prize for 1999. His essays on poets and poetry have appeared in the "Boston Review," the "London Review of Books," the "Times Literary Supplement," and the "Blackwell Companion to 20th Century Poetry."
"I'm delighted and flattered to receive this distinguished award,"I hope it helps more readers discover, and appreciate, Randall Jarrell, who himself certainly knew and admired the work of the writers for whom the award is named. I've wanted to write a book on Jarrell for perhaps 10 years, and I'm very fortunate in that so many of my teachers proved willing to help me do so."
The Warren/Brooks Award was established in 1995 and is made possible by an endowment from the late Eleanor Clark Warren, the Warren Estate and Western Kentucky University. The award is given annually to recognize an outstanding work of literary criticism that exemplifies in spirit, scope and integrity the kind of innovative critical interpretation of literature offered by Warren and Brooks, his frequent collaborator.
The award will be presented during the 16th Annual Robert Penn Warren Symposium on April 27 at Western.
For more information, contact Mary Ellen Miller at (270) 745-5721. More WKU news is available on the World Wide Web at www.wku.edu. If you'd like to receive WKU news via e-mail, send a message to WKUNews@wku.edu.
