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

Bio Note

Alice Fulton’s most recent book of poems is Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems. Felt (W.W. Norton), 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 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.

Her first fiction collection, The Nightingales of Troy: Connected Stories, was published by W.W. Norton in 2008. She has received the Editor's Prize in Fiction, and two of her stories were selected for the Best American Short Stories.

Alice Fulton has 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 five editions of The Best American Poetry series and in the 10th Anniversary edition, The Best of the Best American Poetry. She has received Pushcart Prizes in poetry and in fiction, 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 also have appeared in Tin House, Poetry, The New Yorker, Parnassus, The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and many other magazines.

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 Holloway Poet at UC Berkeley, and a Visiting Professor at UCLA, Ohio State University, and the University of North Carolina. She is currently the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English at Cornell University.