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William Pateron University English Professor Christopher Salerno Wins Georgia Poetry Prize

Christopher Salerno, an English professor at William Paterson University, has won the 2016 inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize for his collection Sun & Urn. Salerno will receive a $1,000 cash reward and his work will be published by the University of Georgia Press in February 2017.

Salerno will also be invited to read his work at the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech and Georgia State University, the institutions sponsoring the prize.

This annual prize is awarded to celebrate excellence in poetry, and is open to unpublished, original collections of poems written in English by North America residents. Three preliminary judges read the submitted manuscripts and selected five finalists each. The finalists’ manuscripts were read by a yearly designated chief judge, who selected the winning manuscript.

“Christopher Salerno’s Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book,” states Thomas Lux, the final judge of this year’s award. “Read it, please, thrice!”

Salerno has authored Whirligig (2006), Minimum Heroic (2010), which won the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and ATM (2014), which won the Georgetown Review Press Poetry Prize. He has also written many journal publications and chapbooks, and was a contributing editor for Academic Discourse: An Anthology of Student Writing (Second Edition, 2010).

As a member of the William Paterson University faculty since 2010, Salerno is co-founder and managing editor of Map Literary, the University’s literary magazine,in addition to teaching courses in creative writing, poetry, rhetoric and composition. He co-created a graduate-level English course entitled The Pedagogy of Creative Writing, and has served as director of William Paterson’s Spring Writers Conference. Salerno is currently the editor of Saturnalia Books, an independent poetry press. He earned an MA from East Carolina University and an MFA from Bennington College in Vermont.   Salerno is a resident of Caldwell.