Henning wins 2019 George Bogin Memorial Award

(sarahenningpoet.com) The Poetry Society of America named Sara Henning as the 2019 winner of the George Bogin Memorial Award. Henning was recognized for the honor at the Poetry Society of America annual awards ceremony, held April 18th, 2019 at the National Arts Club in New York City.

The prize, given by the family of poet and translator George Bogin, recognizes poetry collections “that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms.” Khaled Mattawa selected Henning’s collection for the 2019 honor, stating:

[Henning] revisits memories, probes traumatic moments with enviable objectivity offering tender forgiveness or issuing firm judgments on the self as the case may be. And while the locus of these lyrics is that of personal experience, the poems offer a powerful indictment of the culture of violence against, and degradation of, women surrounding the speaker. The poems deliver these psychological, social and political insights with a great deal of esthetic pleasure. We are quickly and powerfully drawn into the world of these poems and into the experiences of the speaker, and by the end of our reading we find that traces of these experiences have lodged themselves within us, changing us. None of this powerful effect could have been achieved without the poet's choice and manipulation of language, which is always intuitive and surprising, creating word by word a group of poems that moves and enlightens.

Several of the poems are included in Henning’s new collection, Terra Incognita.