The Poetry Foundation announced yesterday the winner of its 2012 Emily Dickinson First Book Award, given occasionally for a poetry collection by a writer over forty.

Maryland writer Hailey Leithauser, born in 1954, received this year's honor for her collection, Swoop, which comes with a ten-thousand-dollar prize and publication of the book by award-winning indie Graywolf Press next year.

Leithauser, who returned to poetry in 2000 after taking decades off from writing post-college, has seen her poetry published in Antioch Review, Gettysburg Review, Poetry, and Sou'wester, as well as in The Best American Poetry 2010. In 2004 she won a "Discovery"/The Nation Award (now the "Discovery"/Boston Review Award). The poet, who studied English as an undergraduate and now holds a master's of library and information science, has worked most recently as senior reference librarian at the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., though she's also taken turns as a salad chef, purveyor of gourmet foods, real estate office manager, copy editor, phone surveyor, and bookstore clerk.

“Leithauser is a risk-taker," says Graywolf editor Jeff Shotts. "She is innovative—with spirited titles and musical outbursts—but also nods to poetic tradition with rhyming sonnets and other lyric techniques...I am engaged, throughout, and admire her wide-ranging talent.”

The Poetry Foundation will honor Leithauser along with 2012 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize winner W. S. Di Piero at a ceremony in Chicago on June 11.

The most recent episode of the literary podcast Other People with Brad Listi features novelist Emily St. John Mandel, whose new book The Lola Quartet, is just out from Unbridled Books. The entire interview is worth a listen—Emily and Brad discuss a wide range of subjects, including literary life in Brooklyn, Emily's career in dance, and taking language courses in French leading up to a book tour of France. However, around the twenty-five minute mark Mandel recounts her first experience with an agent—which entailed a rejection with generous notes, a massive revision that took six months, and a resubmission before she was taken on as a client. The agent was Emilie Jacobsen, who landed a job at Curtis Brown Literary when she was just out of college in 1946, and worked there until she passed away at the age of eighty-five, in 2010. At the time, Emily St. John Mandel wrote a remembrance of Ms. Jacobsen for the Millions.

Choose a topic that interests you—it could be an animal, a scientific process, or a historical event, for example—and research it. Next, think of an unrelated experience from your life—a particularly memorable moment from childhood, perhaps, or when a loved one passed away—and write an essay on the two subjects. Alternate between short paragraphs of factual reportage on the topic and brief, more lyrical vignettes about the remembered experience, with the end goal of finding a way to relate the two. 

Pick an overlooked, everyday object—a scarf, a carton of strawberries, a snow globe—and write eight different scenes or vignettes in which that object appears centrally. Have each scene take place in a different location and have the characters interact with the object in various ways.