9-27-04
PENN STATE BEHREND PROFESSOR WINS BOOK AWARD
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George Looney, assistant professor of English and creative writing at Penn State Behrend and program director of the new B.F.A creative writing program, recently won the White Pine Press Award for his manuscript, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels. The prize includes a $1000 cash award and publication by the White Pine Press. Looney describes his forthcoming book as "an exploration of grief and the illusions we choose to believe in to get us through that grief." |
To say the rhetoric of angels, the messengers of God, is uncertain is to suggest "the way we, in reality, use fictions to help us survive our own lives." He said "uncertainty is an absolute element of our real lives."
Looney is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh, which won the 1995 Bluestem Award, and Attendant Ghosts, published by Cleveland State University Press. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from Bowling Green State University and a B.F.A in art education from the University of Cincinnati. Looney currently has six manuscripts in circulation. He has published more than 200 poems in many of the country's leading literary journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Ascent, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Prairie Schooner.
White Pine Press has published poetry, fiction, essays, and literature in translation since 1973, and has published such poets as Pablo Neruda, James Wright, William Matthews, and Robert Bly. The press strives to "enrich our literary heritage; to promote the cultural awareness, understanding, and respect so vital in our rapidly changing world; and to address complex social and human rights issues through literature."
Looney's book will be available early fall 2005.
Contact: Jen Town, 814-898-6522, jlt234@psu.edu