I Decided on a Winner

Tomaž Šalamun (1941–2014) has published more than thirty books of poetry in his home country of Slovenia. His honors include the Prešeren Fund Prize, the Jenko Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a visiting Fulbright to Columbia University, and a fellowship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Numerous collections of his poetry have been published in English, including On the Tracks of Wild Game (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), The Blue Tower (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), The Book for My Brother (Harcourt, 2005), Row (Arc Publications, 2005), Blackboards (Saturnalia Books, 2004), Poker (Ugly Duckling, 2003), and A Ballad for Metka Krasovec (Twisted Spoon, 2001), among others. His poems have been translated into more than twenty languages. Photo by Kari Klemela

Brian Henry has published six collections of poetry, including Astronaut (Arc, 2000/Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2002), Graft (Arc, 2002/New Issues, 2003), American Incident (Salt Publishing, 2002), Quarantine (Ahsahta Press, 2006), The Stripping Point (Counterpath Press, 2007) and In the Unlikely Event of a Water (Equipage, 2007). Henry won the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for Quarantine . Other honors include the Poetry Society’s George Bogin Memorial Award, the 2006 Carol Weinstein Poetry Prize, and a Forward Prize nomination for Astronaut . He has co-edited Verse since 1995, and he also co-edited The Verse Book of Interviews (Verse Press, 2005). He currently teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Brian Henry’s translation of Tomaž Šalamun’s Woods and Chalices has just been published by Harcourt