Kathleen Jesme
Poet Kathleen Jesme of Inver Grove Heights has won the 2010 Snowbound Chapbook Award from Tupelo Press for "Meridian," a narrative poem she wrote after the death of her mother.
"It will be a beautiful book, because Tupelo does lovely books, they really do," Jesme said Thursday. "I am overjoyed to be one of their authors." Jesme describes "Meridian" as a poet sequence, with elements of both prose and poetry. "It's what I like to do, which is try to piece together a narrative through lyric elements," she said. "It has some qualities of memoir to it, too." Jesme is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA program. She is the author of three previous books and the receipient of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. The Tupelo competition judge was Patricia Fargnoli, former poet laureate of New Hampshire, and the prize is $1,000 and 50 copies of the chapbook. Tupelo Press is a small literary press located in Massachusetts."I love to be published by presses that I really like," Jesme said. "Of course, one loves to be published, in general; you're not fussy. But it's really a special experience when it is a publisher you love."
