Waters is Co-Recipient of Towson University Prize

SALISBURY, MD---Dr. Michael Waters, professor of English at Salisbury University, is co-recipient of this year’s Towson University Prize for Literature. Waters is honored for his 2001 book Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems. In past years, the prize has gone to such notable authors as Ann Tyler. This year, Waters shares the award with Donna Hemans, author of River Woman. Parthenopi is Waters’ third book to win the prize. The first was Anniversary of the Air (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1985) and the second The Burden Lifters (Carnegie-Mellon, 1989). Waters has received a Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Individual Artist awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and three Pushcart prizes. Parthenopi is his seventh collection of poetry. Other volumes include Contemporary American Poetry with the late A. Poulin Jr. (Houghton Mifflin, 2001), Green Ash, Red Maple, Black Gum (BOA Editions, 1997), Bountiful (Carnegie-Mellon, 1992) and Not Just Any Death (BOA, 1979). He edited A. Poulin Jr.: Selected Poems (BOA, 2001) and co-edited Perfect in Their Art: Poems on Boxing from Homer to Ali (Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). He also co-translated, with Mihaela Moscaliuc, Death Searches for You a Second Time by Romanian poet Carmelia Leonte (Red Dragonfly, 2003). Waters’ poems have appeared in Poetry, The Yale Review, The American Poetry Review, Rolling Stone, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, The North American Review and Ploughshares. “I cannot call to mind anyone of Waters’ generation who is currently writing better poetry,” wrote critic Floyd Collins in The Gettysburg Review. Waters earned his B.A. and M.A. at SUNY-Brockport, his M.F.A. at the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. at Ohio University. In addition, he has served as the Visiting Professor of American Literature at the University of Athens, Greece and was appointed Banister Writer-in-Residence at Sweet Briar College in VA. He has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland. In 2005 he serves as the Stadler Poet-in-Residence at Bucknell University.   Prior to joining the faculty at SU in 1978, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at Ohio University. He has also taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maryland College Park. For more information call 410-543-6030 or visit the SU Web site at www.salisbury.edu.