John C. Zacharis Award Winner Doreen Gildroy

John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Doreen Gildroy with the twelfth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection of poems, The Little Field of Self (Univ. of Chicago, 2002). The $1,500 award -- which is named after Emerson College's former president -- honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between fiction and poetry.

This year's judge was the poet John Skoyles, who is a Ploughshares trustee. In choosing the collection for the John C. Zacharis Award, he said: "Doreen Gildroy's poems effortlessly convey emotional heft and depth. With an exquisite sense of timing, they touch down at just the right moments with a surprising tenderness and sensuality. The Little Field of Self is a book that accumulates power with each page until the field becomes the world, and one self becomes the many." In a review for The Los Angeles Times, Carol Muske-Dukes wrote: "The serene gravity of this debut collection is attended by a sense of enchantment so convincing that the poems, like a tapestry, come alive as both the subject and object of desire."

Doreen Gildroy was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1961. She went to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and received her B.A. in rhetoric, then studied comparative literature -- first at Illinois, and later at the University of Chicago. In the midst of her graduate studies, she took a job for a year as a visiting lecturer in the English department at the University of Barcelona, and she ended up staying in Spain for two more years, teaching at the North American Institute while working on her poetry. Eventually she received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Warren Wilson College. Some of her first publications were in TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares.

Asked how the poems in The Little Field of Self came about, Gildroy writes: "When I started the book, I only knew that I was going to begin something, and I was going to follow it through to the end. I was reading St. Augustine and Plotinus. A sense of time, of place, was crucial to the book. In that it was a place for it to occur. My husband and I were living in a castle in Brittany, thanks to a strange and wonderful fellowship he had gotten. The castle was in the middle of nowhere (at the same latitude as Labrador). We arrived in a blizzard. There were rats.

"It was a place to work. We were alone for months and months. In the winter, we were mostly confined because of the weather. In the spring, we began to take walks around the moat, and into the forest. We had the freedom to simply walk around and look at things, and that took on a life of its own -- in the way one looks at the self, at the other, at the world. And we did get restless. I read Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, because it was something I could get, and read, and keep reading, and I think that was sustaining, because The Little Field of Self ended up becoming one long poem. The emotional landscape was, for me, always in the foreground. (Any kind of dramatic detail fell to the backdrop.) In a way, I feel that those poems could have occurred in another place altogether -- but that's where I was, that's what I was looking at -- so that was the configuration. But what I love about that place, is that it was stark, it was severe, and it had its own kind of untouched beauty. At times it was utterly quiet. It had a certain quality of light. And that opened up a world that helped those poems along."

Gildroy lives in Irvine, California, with her husband and her daughter. She is completing another manuscript entitled Unmitigated Hue.