Tobin Wins Boston Authors Club Book Prize for Poetry

Writing, Literature and Publishing Professor Daniel Tobin won this year’s Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Authors Club for his book-length poem, From Nothing (Four Way Books).

The Julia Ward Howe Prize is awarded each year to the most outstanding overall title and most outstanding young adult title written by an author within 100 miles of Boston. It was presented to Tobin and Grace Lin, winner of the young adult prize for her book, When the Sea Turned to Silver, on Wednesday, September 13, at the Boston Public Library.

From Nothing is a meditation on the life of Belgian physicist and priest Georges Lemaitre, known as the “father of the Big Bang.”

Tobin has written seven books of poetry, including From Nothing: Where the World Is Made, Double Life, The Narrows, Second Things, Belated Heavens, and The Net. He has won numerous awards, including the Massachusetts Book Award and the Robert Penn Warren Award, and has held a number of fellowships, including a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a poetry fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The Harvard Review, The Paris Review, Poetry, and The American Scholar, among many others.

He is the author of a critical study, Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney, and a book of essays, Awake in America, and has edited a number of poetry anthologies.

The Boston Authors Club was founded in 1899 by a group of women including Julia Ward Howe to “…further literary purposes and to promote social intercourse among the authors of Boston and vicinity.” Members have included Mark Twain, Willa Cather, Isaac Asimov, and Anne Sexton.

The Julia Ward Howe Prize is in its 20th year and has been awarded to Alice Hoffman, M.T. Anderson, James Carroll, Anita Diamant, and B.A. Shapiro, among others.