Milkweed Editions Announces a $10K Prize for Poetry

Publisher's Weekly announces that Milkweed Editions, a publisher and literary nonprofit based in Minneapolis, has created a $10,000 poetry prize (pretty impressive!) for an original manuscript. The Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry is in collaboration with a local law firm, and will only be available to residents of North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. It comes with a book contract. More:

This award, according to Milkweed publisher Daniel Slager, provides the largest purse for regional poetry established to date in the United States. “There are so many national and international poetry prizes,” he noted, “But none, as far as I know, that are as lucrative for regional poetry.” The first Lindquist & Vennum Prize-winning collection of poems will be published by Milkweed in November 2012. The judge for the first year’s submissions will be Peter Campion (The Lions), who’s received a Pushcart Prize, the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Campion teaches in the M.F.A. program at the University of Minnesota.

Milkweed sponsors two other literary prizes that are awarded annually, with recipients selected by Milkweed editors: the Milkweed National Fiction Prize and the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature.