an Orientalist Burlesque, wins our third annual Tenth Gate Prize for poetry. He will receive $1000 and publication in 2017.
Sedarat of Montclair, NJ, is the author of three previous poetry collections:
Dear Regime: Letters to the Islamic Republic, which won Ohio UP's 2007 Hollis Summers' Prize;
Ghazal Games (Ohio UP, 2011); and
Foot Faults: Tennis Poems (David Roberts Books, 2016).
A recent recipient of the Willis Barnstone Prize in Literary Translation, he teaches poetry and literary translation in the MFA Program at Queens College, City University of New York.
Congratulations also to...
The finalists:
Ecotones by Janet Kaplan Heisenberg's Salon by Susan Lewis
The Sense Series, Volume 2, Books Four to Six by Sally Van Doren
Stir the Lake by Daneen Wardrop
And the semifinalists:
Starlight and Error by Remica Bingham-Risher
The Poetics of Men by Esperanza Cintron
In Bas-Relief by Tom Holmes
Loose Horse in the Valley by JoAnne McFarland
Swallow by Frank Paino Tempe Rubato by Boyer Rickel
Nets Full of Breath by Liz Robbins
Catafalque by Adam Tavel
More about Haji as Puppet...
Roger Sedarat
Born to an Iranian father and an American mother, Sedarat frequently complicates his hybrid identity by fusing his two poetic traditions.
In addition to translating classical poets from Iran like Hafez, he has written a postmodern collection of Persian ghazals in English. One critic said of his work, "It's Wallace Stevens meets Rumi."
Through his persona character, Haji--a name given to him at age four by his Iranian family because of his early resemblance to the star in the American film from the 1950s, The Adventures of Hajji Baba--he seeks to expose the superficial gaze of Middle Eastern culture by a western audience. This new collection is based on a series of staged performances as Haji.
NEW WEBSITE!
Past Washington Prize winner
Love-in-Idleness by John Bradly, second edition (2015)
Check out our spiffed-up website, made possible by the hard work and Xtreme Zapskills of
Chelsea Adams, Chadams Web Consulting.
Newly organized as well as beautifully groomed, the site will practically navigate itself for you now, with more to come, including origami poetry, video poems, live recordings of readings,
and of course THE best book covers, thanks to our talented designer, Susan Pearce.
