CCM: Poet Prize Winner to be Honored by Journal of New Jersey Poets

Published on April 01, 2018

On Wednesday, April 18, County College of Morris will host a reception to celebrate the publication of the 2018 issue of the Journal of New Jersey Poets and honor this year's New Jersey Poets Prize recipient, Meghan Privitello, of Ventnor City.

Meghan Privitello, the winner of this year's New Jersey Poets Prize.
Courtesy of Meghan Privitello

Along with featuring a reading by Privitello, this year's event will include a reading by Emari DiGiorgio and a tribute to the late Joe Salerno, whose daughter Miriam will present his work. The event, which is free and open to the public, takes place from 6 to 8 p.m. in the Art and Design Gallery in the Learning Resource Center on CCM's Randolph campus, 214 Center Grove Road. The event will include book signings and light refreshments.

The Journal of New Jersey Poets, the only annual compendium of poetry by authors who were born, raised or have an association with the state, began at Fairleigh Dickinson University, which published the first issue in 1975. CCM has been home to the journal since 1990, and 2018 will mark the ninth year of the New Jersey Poets Prize.

Privitello is the author of A New Language for Falling out of Love (YesYes Books, 2015), Notes on the End of the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), and One God at a Time (forthcoming, YesYes Books, 2019). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, A Public Space, Boston Review, Guernica, Best New Poets, Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a New Jersey State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry.

Emari DiGiorgio
Courtesy of Emari DiGiorgio

DiGiorgio is the author of Girl Torpedo, the winner of the 2017 Numinous Orison, Luminous Origin Literary Award; and The Things a Body Might Become. She is the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize, the Ellen La Forge Memorial Poetry Prize, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, RHINO's Founder's Prize, the Woodrow Hall Top Shelf Award and a poetry fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has received residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Sundress Academy of the Arts and Rivendell Writers' Colony. She teaches at Stockton University, is a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Poet and hosts World Above, a monthly reading series in Atlantic City.

Salerno was born in the Bronx in 1947 and moved to New Jersey with his family when he was seven. He received his B.A. in English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he edited the literary magazine Now. His graduate work was done at the University of Michigan under the tutelage of Donald Hall and Robert Hayden. In 1972, he won the Hopwood Award, Michigan's most coveted prize for poetry. He continued to write and to publish in such well-known magazines as Wormwood Review and Yankee, and received a 1982 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. Salerno died of lung cancer on November 22, 1995. He is survived by his wife, Beverly, and his three children, David, Miriam and Daniel.

Poets who have read at CCM include such national figures as Allen Ginsberg, James Wright, Stephen Dobyns, Ishmael Reed and the United States Consultants in Poetry/U.S. Poets Laureate William Stafford, Howard Nemerov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop, Donald Hall and Philip Levine.

For more information, email journalofnjpoets@ccm.edu or visit www.journalofnjpoets.com/.