Heather Treseler [1] (English [2]) is the winner of the prestigious Furious Flower Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers [3], a national prize for poets who have published no more than one book of poems.
Marilyn Nelson, a chancellor in the American Academy of Poets, recently announced the prize, which is sponsored by the Furious Flower Poetry Center at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. The prize comes with a $1,000 award and travel honorarium for a reading on their campus on April 10.
The prize also carries another more personal honor for Treseler. “I have been reading Nelson’s work since I was a teenager, and I frequently teach her work in my poetry classes at Worcester State,” she said. “She manages, among other things, to consolidate complex rich narratives into lyric poems, and she has been recognized by a number of national prizes after a distinguished teaching career at the University of Connecticut and a stint as that state’s poet laureate.”
The three poems that Nelson chose are from Treseler’s manuscript in-progress, “Thesaurus for a Year of Desire.” Other poems in this manuscript have received the Frank O’Hara Poetry Prize (2016) and second place in the Crosswinds Poetry Journal’s Annual Contest (2018). Her work has received support from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Treseler is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in books and journals, including Harvard Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Boston Review. Recently, she authored a review of B.K. Fischer’s “Radioapocrypha” [4] for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
In 2017, she received Worcester State University’s George I. Alden Award for Excellence in Teaching.