HWS News
13 July 2023 Seneca Review Lyric Essay Wins Colorado Book Award By Andrew Wickenden '09
Published by Seneca Review Books, Katherine Indermaur’s full-length lyric essay is the winner of the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry.
I/I by Katherine Indermaur was published in 2022 by Seneca Review Books after winning the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. This spring, the book was selected by a panel of judges for the Colorado Book Award in Poetry.
Writer Kazim Ali, who selected I/I for the Tall Prize, praised Indermaur’s exploration of “the mirror’s many dimensions — philosophical, spiritual, scientific, mythological, historical — alongside the author’s own experiences.”
As the publisher notes, “Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one's own reflection. Indermaur's essay, however, does more than merely problematize the contested space where the face and the mirror meet. There is also affirmation to be found here. This is a book that thinks so keenly it breaks into song."
The Colorado Book Awards annually celebrate the accomplishments of Colorado’s outstanding authors, editors, illustrators and photographers.
Since 2018, Seneca Review Books has facilitated the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, a biennial book series to encourage and support innovative work in the essay. Cross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or related pieces, and “beyond category”projects are all within the ambit of the contest.
Seneca Review Books is an imprint of Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press, which has also published Seneca Review, the Colleges’ internationally distributed literary magazine, for more than 50 years. Known as the birthplace of the Lyric Essay, the magazine was an early champion of multimodal and hybrid-forms writing. Seneca Review has also published special issues on translation, on writing about disability and on writing that is “beyond category.” The anthology We Might As Well Call it the Lyric Essay is a seminal text in creative nonfiction. The journal releases a fall and spring issue every year, except during the fall of even-numbered years, when the press publishes the book prize’s winner in lieu of a fall issue.
Seneca Review Books will be accepting submissions for the next iteration of the book prize until August 1, 2023. Wendy S. Walters will serve as the final judge.
Learn more about Seneca Review.
Above, Katherine Indermaur accepts the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry for her full-length lyric essay I/I, published by Seneca Review Books.
