Bobbitt Prize Statement for Felt

“Full of animated, charged poems, Alice Fulton’s latest collection sizzles with logophilia and tropes, is blessed with the kind of direct wiring between sensation and language, feeling and form, that strikes first with physical and then with intellectual and emotional wallop. Hers is a poetic sensibility at once remarkably comprehensive and remarkably precise, and felt; her best book so far is possessed of great velocity, great staying-power.”
— David Baker, Eamon Grennan, and Heather McHugh

The American Academy of Arts and Letters,
Literature Award

"to honor exceptional accomplishment"

“Alice Fulton has already been recognized as one of America's best poets, whose work combines lyrical sensuality and subtle wordplay. She is also a gifted and original author of fiction; her first novel, The Nightingales of Troy, is both beautifully written and a moving portrait of personal and family history. ”

Literature Award Committee

Bio Note

Alice Fulton’s most recent collection is Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems. Her book Felt was awarded the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress. This biennial poetry prize is given on behalf of the nation in recognition of the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. Felt also was selected by the Los Angeles Times as one of the Best Books of 2001 and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her other books include Barely Composed, The Nightingales of Troy (fiction); Cascade Experiment; Sensual Math; Powers Of Congress; Palladium, winner of the National Poetry Series and the Society of Midland Authors Award; and Dance Script With Electric Ballerina, winner of The Associated Writing Programs Award. A collection of essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press.

Alice Fulton is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature and has also received fellowships in poetry from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, The Michigan Society of Fellows, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has been included in The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry; The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine; five editions of The Best American Poetry series; and the 10th Anniversary edition and the 25th Anniversary edition of The Best of the Best American Poetry. Two stories from The Nightingales of Troy were selected for the Best American Short Stories series, another for the Pushcart Prize, and a fourth for the Editor's Prize in Fiction. She has also received Pushcart Prizes in poetry, the Bess Hokin award from Poetry, The Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review, and the Emily Dickinson and Consuelo Ford Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Poems and Fiction have appeared in Tin House, Little Star, Poetry, The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines.

A setting by Doug Ovens of three of Alice Fulton's poems commissioned by Muhlenberg College premiered at the Baker Center for the Arts in Allentown, Pa. Joseph Klein’s setting for Fulton’s poems premiered in the University of North Texas Center for Experimental Music & Intermedia Concert Series, as did James Worlton’s The Etiquette of Ice, a setting of Fulton poems. Anthony Cornicello’s ...turns and turns into the night, a setting of Fulton poems, premiered in the Works and Process Series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Enid Sutherland’s operatic composition based on Fulton's book-length poem, “Give: A Sequence Reimagining Daphne & Apollo,” premiered at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater in Ann Arbor, Michigan. William Bolcom included her work in his song cycle I Will Breathe A Mountain: A Cycle from American Women Poets. Its debut performance was by Marilyn Horne at Carnegie Hall’s Centennial Celebration. Turbulence: A Romance, a song cycle with music by William Bolcom and words by Alice Fulton, was performed by Hunter and Kent at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Alice Fulton has been the George Elliston Poet at University of Cincinnati, the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in the Practice of Poetry at University of California, Berkeley, The Michael M. Rea Visiting Writer at University of Virginia, and a Visiting Professor at University of California, Los Angeles, Ohio State University, and the University of North Carolina. She is currently the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.