John C. Zacharis First Book Award

Ploughshares is pleased to present Jill Osier with the thirtieth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her poetry collection, The Solace Is Not the Lullaby (Yale University Press, 2020). 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 poetry and fiction.

This year’s judge was John Skoyles, Ploughshares’ Poetry Editor. About the book, Skoyles writes: “Jill Osier’s The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, written with exactitude and focus, is a laser-sharp examination of everyday events involving small towns, families, flirtations, hardships, and losses. What is ordinary in the course of a day is made extraordinary in this collection—not with bombast or high rhetoric, but with highly intelligent perceptive phrases that, line by line, create a world. The accomplishment of this book is how it manages to harness an inviting voice to an uncompromising vision: it is impossible to look away from the page, even as something painful or devastating is being described. The Solace Is Not the Lullaby is sensual, precise, and full of life.”

Osier won the 2019 Yale Younger Poets Prize (selected by Carl Phillips), as well, for The Solace Is Not the Lullaby. In 2017, she received the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, given for a manuscript in progress. Osier is also the author of the chapbooks from (Bull City Press, 2018) and Should Our Undoing Come Down Upon Us White (Bull City Press, 2013), winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, as well as the letterpress chapbook Bedful of Nebraskas (sunnyoutside, 2012). Her poems appear in journals such as Alaska Quarterly Review, the Georgia Review, the Gettysburg Review, Granta, Poetry, and the Southern Review, in addition to Ploughshares. She is a recipient of the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

In The Solace Is Not the Lullaby, Osier has gathered work spanning more than twenty years. Its poems offer quiet attention and close listening as witness to the human and natural worlds, tracing a lifelong connection to a place—and a lifelong seeking.