Allison Joseph, Zacharis Award

We are proud to announce Allison Joseph as the 1992 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection,
What Keeps Us Here, published by Ampersand Press. The annual $1,500 award -- which is named after Emerson College's former president and funded by philanthropist Eugenia Gladstone Vogel -- honors the best debut book of poetry or short fiction published by a
Ploughshares writer. Emerson College, our institutional sponsor, provides additional support and administration for the award.

In nominating Joseph, Advisory Editor Maura Stanton wrote that "Allison Joseph is a brilliant young poet, and her first book is full of powerful, highly crafted poems which clearly announce that she is at the beginning of an extraordinary career." (
What Keeps Us Here is reviewed by Stanton on page 237. All of the reviews in this issue's "Bookshelf," by the way, focus on first books, and the contributors' notes are longer and more-personal than usual, revealing backgrounds, influences, and vocations of these emerging writers as they've tried to break in or through.)

Joseph was born in London, England, in 1967 to parents of Caribbean heritage. She grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx, New York, and studied at Kenyon College and Indiana University. She was the first undergraduate student since Robert Lowell to be published in
The Kenyon Review. In the last four years, her poems have appeared in over fifty magazines, and she has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Ruth Lily Fellowship, and an Associated Writing Programs
Intro Journals Prize. Her collection,
What Keeps Us Here, was also the first winner of Ampersand Press's Women Poets Series Competition. Currently, Joseph is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arkansas, and she lives in Little Rock with her husband, poet Jon Tribble.

The Zacharis Award was inaugurated in 1991, with David Wong Louie the winner for his short-story collection,
Pangs of Love. The award is nominated by the Advisory Editors of
Ploughshares, with Executive Director DeWitt Henry acting as the final judge. There is no application process.