Poet Linda Gregg of New York City received high honors from the Academy of American Poets today as winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Fellow poets Dorianne Laux, J. D. McClatchy, and James Richardson selected her latest collection, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2008) for the twenty-five-thousand-dollar award, given for a collection published in the previous year.

The book, Gregg's eighth, also won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America (PSA) in March. Gregg's poetry has been recognized by PEN American Center, with the PEN/Voelcker Award, and Poets & Writers, Inc., with the Jackson Poetry Prize, and she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gregg, who has said of her work, "The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human," receives from the Academy an award named for a writer and activist who promoted the sacredness of the world in her own right: Lenore Marshall helped form the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, an organization that helped pass the partial nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. The New Hope Foundation created the prize in her memory in 1975.

The list of past winners—a group that includes John Ashbery, Wanda Coleman, Stanley Kunitz, and Alice Notley—is posted on the Academy's Web site.

Gregg reads at the Jackson Poetry Prize ceremony in May:

After bowing out of consideration for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, storied story writer Alice Munro has been named one of five finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her collection Too Much Happiness (McClelland and Stewart) is the fourth of her books to be nominated for the award, which she won in 2004 for Runaway (McClelland and Stewart). The twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize is given for a novel or short story collection by a Canadian author.

The other finalists, announced today, are:
Nicole Brossard for her novel Fences in Breathing (Coach House Books), translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Douglas Coupland for his novel Generation A (Random House Canada)
Annabel Lyon for her debut novel The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)
Andrew Steinmetz for his debut novel Eva's Threepenny Theatre (Gaspereau Press)

Descriptions of the shortlisted books—from a memoir-inspired tale of a Brechtian performer to a fictionalized story of Aristotle's tutoring a young Alexander the Great—are posted along with finalist biographies on the prize Web site. The winner will be announced on November 24.

There are only two days remaining to enter the Short Fiction Contest from Zoetrope: All-Story, the lit mag founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997. Not only will the winner receive a prize of one thousand dollars and publication on the magazine's Web site, but he or she, along with nine finalists, will also be considered for representation by a number of literary agencies. The ten top story writers will have their work reviewed by the William Morris Agency, International Creative Management, Regal Literary, the Elaine Markson Literary Agency, Inkwell Management, Sterling Lord Literistic, and the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

The judge this year is Yiyun Li, author of the award-winning story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House, 2005) and The Vagrants (Random House, 2009), which is up for the 2009 First Novel Prize from the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. She is a contributing editor of A Public Space.

Stories of up to five thousand words can be submitted, along with a fifteen-dollar entry fee, via the journal's online submission system until 11:59 PM on Thursday, October 1.

The winner of last year's contest was Bernie McGill of Portstewart, Ireland, for "Sleepwalkers," selected by Elizabeth McCracken.

Persea Books is now accepting entries to the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, which offers the winning poet one thousand dollars, publication of her poetry collection, and, for the first time this year, a six-week residency in Italy. The all-expenses-paid retreat will take place at the Civitella Ranieri Center, a fifteenth century castle in Italy's Umbria region.

The contest is open to women poets who have not yet published a book-length collection. The deadline for manuscripts, which should be forty-six to ninety-eight pages, is November 1. The winner, to be announced in January, is chosen by an anonymous selection committee.

Previous years' winners are:
2009 Alexandra Teague for Mortal Geography
2008 Tara Bray for Mistaken for Song
2007 Anne Shaw for Undertow
2006 Alena Hairston for The Logan Topographies

The award is a collaborative effort between Persea Books, independent publisher of collections by poets such as Sarah Gambito, Marie Howe, and Thylias Moss, and the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Project, named for the late poet Lexi Rudnitsky, author of A Doorless Knocking Into Night (Mid-List Press, 2005).