Jonathan Thirkield

Jonathan Thirkield and Arda Collins, recent graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, have just been awarded prestigious first-book prizes. Thirkield's collection "The Waker's Corridor" won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Arda Collins' "It Is Daylight" won 2008 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

Collin's collection was selected by judge Louise Glück and will be published by Yale University Press in 2009. Collins' poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, A Public Space, jubilat and the Canarium. A 2004 graduate of the Writers' Workshop, where she was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow, she is an editor of the online poetry journal GutCult.

Thirkield was a Truman Capote Fellow at the workshop and graduated in 2003. His collection was selected by Linda Bierds for the 2008 Walt Whitman Award, presented by the Academy of American Poets. His poems have appeared in WebConjunctions, New American Writing, the Colorado Review, 1913: a journal of forms, American Letters & Commentary, Verse and other journals.