David Gewanter, Zacharis Award

Zacharis Award 
Ploughshares and Emerson College are pleased to present David Gewanter with the eighth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for his collection of poems,
In the Belly, which was published last year by the University of Chicago Press. 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 fiction. This year's judge was the poet John Skoyles, who is a
Ploughshares trustee.

David Gewanter was born in 1954 in New York City. The son of a pathologist and an art gallery entrepreneur, he was raised in New Jersey, New York, and principally in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For a brief time, Gewanter was a premed student at the University of Michigan, thinking he would follow in his father's footsteps and become a doctor, but his attention wandered, and he ended up majoring in Intellectual History. "I was an energetic but unfocused student, or overfocused on issues that weren't on the syllabus," he says. With only one term paper left to complete his undergraduate degree, he took "what I'll charitably call a hiatus" and parked himself in London for two years. There, he lived two doors down from John Keats's former house. After reading Keats's manuscripts, Gewanter was inspired for the first time to write his own poetry.

He returned to the U.S. and supported himself with all kinds of manual labor, from carpentry to jackhammering to driving a forklift. He also washed dishes for almost two years. "I tried to read Sophocles on my breaks," he recalls. "Not a good plan." Finally he finished his B.A. at Michigan, winning a Hopwood Award, then traveled to Barcelona and taught ESL for a year. He then went to the University of California at Berkeley, where he eventually earned a Ph.D. in English. Along the way, he took poetry workshops with Thom Gunn, Robert Pinsky, and Frank Bidart, and spent one semester at Harvard University, studying with Seamus Heaney. His poetry career went slowly, his first publications in
Occident and
Poetry Flash, then in
The Threepenny Review, Agni, New England Review, Tikkun, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and the anthologies
The National Poetry Competition and
New Voices.

He moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and taught expository writing at Harvard, later directing two writing programs there. All the long while, he worked on
In the Belly, which had begun as his master's degree thesis. "I kept adding new poems and throwing out the worst," Gewanter says. "The first and last poems of the book were among the last done. If the publisher hadn't accepted it, I'd still be tinkering."

In the Belly is structured into three parts that examine the body of a life: youth, romance, and family. At turns erudite and colloquial, always lyrical, the collection presents a voice with a maturity, technical mastery, and emotional weight that are extremely rare in first books. Poet Mark Doty writes: "These poems examine the body, the inescapable locus of desire and of loss, of persistence and of decay. Gewanter's careful ear and delicate eye are engaged in a sustained work of investigation: a struggle to find, in the difficult stuff of experience, what can be known, and said." John Skoyles comments about the book: "A stunning diction, a sinewy syntax, a true and convincing tone of voice: these are among the many qualities I admire in David Gewanter's
In the Belly. From the first poem, 'Annals of the Wonder-Cabinet,' I felt drawn to read the words aloud, so inviting is their music and so compelling their subjects. I admire the necessity and finish of these wonderful poems."

Gewanter now lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife, the writer Joy Young, and their baby son. He is teaching poetry at Georgetown University and working on a new manuscript of poems,
The Sleep of Reason, and a book of essays,
Identity Poetics. He is also editing, with Frank Bidart,
The Collected Poems of Robert Lowell for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

The John C. Zacharis First Book Award was inaugurated in 1991. The past winners are: Carolyn Ferrell for
Don't Erase Me; Kevin Young for
Most Way Home; Debra Spark for
Coconuts for the Saint; Tony Hoagland for
Sweet Ruin; Jessica Treadway for
Absent Without Leave; Allison Joseph for
What Keeps Us Here; and David Wong Louie for
The Pangs of Love. The award is nominated by the advisory editors of
Ploughshares. 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.