We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2016 Mary
Ballard Poetry Chapbook prize -- David Allen Sullivan's book Take Wing.
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| Photo by Jules Barivan |
David Allen Sullivan is a former Fullbright scholar who has
written a number of poetry books on topics ranging from the Iraq war to his
father's dementia. His poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's
Almanac.
He teaches at Cabrillo College, where he edits the Porter
Gulch Review with his students, and lives in Santa Cruz with his love, the
historian Cherie Barkey, and their two children, Jules and Mina Barivan.
Our 2016 judge was Rosemary Catacalos. Catacalos was the
2013 Poet Laureate of Texas, a Paisano fellow, National Endowment for the Arts
fellow, and her poetry has been nominated for many Pushcart prizes and included
in poetry anthologies.
Catacalos said that Sullivan's depiction of the loss of
loved ones was "central to our shared humanity. Take Wing has given us
poems that confront death with the mineral strength of a spiritual
warrior."
She praised the language in the collection, calling it
"useful, spare, washed clean: bones that play an essential music."
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