I was delighted to learn March 22 that If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free?: Literature and Social Change has been named a finalist, accompanied by a $1,000 US award, in the Poetry Foundation’s 2019 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism competition. The Pegasus Award “seeks to honor the best book-length works of criticism published in the US in the prior calendar year… that consider the subject of poetry or poets.”
The Poetry Foundation is the publisher of Poetry magazine, founded in Chicago in 1912 and famous for featuring early in their careers such poets as Ezra Pound, W.C. Williams, and W.B. Yeats. The magazine first published subsequently-famous poems by such luminaries as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.
If You’re Not Free at Work is also a finalist for B.C.’s 2019 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature. In this competition “three judges are asked to select an outstanding work of literary and social value that opens up discussion of social and cultural issues.” The $2,000 Ryga Award will be announced in June at the Vancouver Public Library.