Tony Hoagland, John C. Zacharis Award

John C. Zacharis Award  Ploughshares and Emerson College are proud to announce that Tony Hoagland has been named the 1994 recipient of the John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of poems, Sweet Ruin. The $1,500 award -- which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college's former president -- honors the best debut book published by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between poetry and short fiction.

Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The son of an Army doctor, he grew up on bases in the South and around the world. After "barely surviving" his adolescence in southern Louisiana, he attended and dropped out of several colleges, picked apples and cherries in the Northwest, lived in communes, followed the Grateful Dead, and became a Buddhist. All the while, poetry was a passion for Hoagland, but he admits he was a late bloomer. "I was incredibly untalented," he says. "It took a long, long time for me just to get competent. When you're a student of poetry, you're lucky if you don't realize how untalented and ignorant you are until you get a little better. Otherwise, you would just stop."

Hoagland finally graduated with a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa, then received his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Subsequently, he worked in the poets-in-the-schools program, and has since made a livelihood teaching English composition at a dozen different institutions, from California to Kalamazoo.

He has published his poems and essays about poetry in The American Poetry Review, Harper's, The Harvard Review, Parnassus, and elsewhere, and his work has been anthologized in New American Poets of the Nineties, The Best of Crazyhorse, and The Pushcart Prize. In addition, he has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as one to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.

Sweet Ruin won the 1992 Brittingham Prize in Poetry and was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. In reviewing the book for Ploughshares, poet Steven Cramer wrote about Hoagland's work: "His muscular, conversational lines sprint from narrative passages to metaphorical clusters to speculative meditations, and then loop back, fast-talking and digressing their way into the book's richly American interior. . . . Hoagland's is some of the most sheerly enjoyable writing I've encountered in a long time. With his 'foot upon the gas / between future and past,' he dazzles and rants, praises and blames, and in his keen noticings and reflections, he 'accomplishes pleasure' on almost every leg of the journey. It's deeply gratifying to be along for the ride."

Hoagland currently lives in Waterville, Maine, and teaches part time at Colby College and at Warren Wilson's M.F.A. program in writing. He is halfway through a new collection, in which he is making a conscious effort to widen the scope of his poetry. "It's a real concern of mine to write about culture in a larger way, to try to make personal discourse merge with or be contextualized by cultural crises."

The John C. Zacharis Award was inaugurated in 1991, when David Wong Louie was the winner for his short story collection, The Pangs of Love. Allison Joseph was honored for her poetry collection, What Keeps Us Here, in 1992, and Jessica Treadway won the award for her story collection, Absent Without Leave, in 1993. The award is nominated by the advisory editors of Ploughshares, with executive director DeWitt Henry acting as the final judge. There is no formal application process; all writers who have been published in Ploughshares are eligible, and should simply direct two copies of their first book to our office.