PORT ANGELES — Karen Whalley of Port Angeles has received the 2018 Off the Grid Poetry Prize for her most recent collection of poetry.
The annual competition is open to authors more than 60 years old, with the winner receiving $1,000 and publication by Off the Grid Press.
This year’s competition drew about 960 submissions.
Elaine Terranova, this year’s judge for the prize, selected Whalley’s “My Own Name Seems Strange to Me,” for its “astute observations [that] reach deeply, easily into philosophy and meaning.”
The book is slated for publication this fall.
Whalley, who had her first poem published about 30 years ago in The Seattle Times Sunday section, described “My Own Name” as an examination of relationships between family members or men and women.
“I like to see mythology at work in the world, and that is probably the lens I most use to examine people,” Whalley said in a news release.
The book is comprised of poems Whalley has written since her first publication, “The Rented Violin,” in 2003.
Between now and then, many of the poems in “My Own Name” have been published in journals such as The American Poetry Review, The Sun Magazine and Mississippi Review.
She has studied poetry with Nelson Bentley at the University of Washington and has a master’s of fine arts in poetry from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina.
Off the Grid Press is an imprint of Grid Books. The Off the Grid Prize was founded in the fall of 2011 to provide a forum for older poets.
For more information, visit www.grid-books.org.
