Starrett Poetry Prize "one of America’ s most distinguished awards for a first book of poetry" for his collection Paper Anniversary. The collection will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, which sponsors the prize, in the fall of 2010. Rogers' manuscript was selected from over 700 entries, with Ed Ochester, Pitt Poetry Series editor, serving as judge. “I was thrilled to pick up the phone and hear Ed Ochester tell me he had ?good news about the manuscript.' There's no better fate for a first book than to find a home in the Pitt Poetry Series,” said Rogers. “I was excited to win the Starrett Prize, but I felt even more honored just to be asso-ciated with the excellent poets who have been published by Pitt over the years.” Describing Paper Anniversary, Roger cited the authors and works that have inspired him. “I hope my collection of poems, in some small way, does honor to the work of Whitman and Dickinson, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Penn Warren, the stories and voices I heard on my grandparents' porch, the language of the public school playground, the ball field chatter and work site rhythms I grew up with,” he said. “The book of Ecclesiastes and the epistle of James, the prose of Peter Taylor and John Cheever and Flannery O'Connor and James Agee?these and other writers have set up shop in my head.” The 45 year-old Rogers grew up in McKenzie, Tennessee, and was educated at Union University, the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and the University of Virginia, where he held a Henry Hoyns Fellowship in Creative Writing. There he studied with Charles Wright, Greg Orr, George Garrett, and John Casey. Rogers' poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Greensboro Review, Image, Epoch, Puerto del Sol, The Iron Horse Literary Review, Southwest Review, Sou’wester, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Southern Humanities Review, Washington Square, and Meridian, among others. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and he won the Greensboro Review Literary Prize in Poetry for 2002. Currently, he is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. He lives in Memphis with his wife, son and daughter.
