PEN Texas, a chapter of the writers association PEN USA, announced the other day that Judith Pacht has won the 2011 PEN Southwest Book Award for her collection Summer Hunger from Tebot Bach. The winners in the poetry, fiction and nonfiction categories each win a $500 prize. This is a great victory for Judith and also for the press, which publishes multiple books each year and does charity work with the homeless, battered women’s shelters and other disadvantaged groups around the Southland.
Judith Pacht’s book of collected poems, Summer Hunger, was published in October, 2010, and her chapbooks, User’s Guide and St. Louis Suite were published in 2009 and 2010. Her manuscript Vectors was a finalist for the 2008 Philip Levine Prize, and her poem, Waterville, Maine won Honorable Mention in the 2007 Robert Frost Award and the 2007 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry competitions. Pacht was first place winner in the Georgia Poetry Society, Edgar Bowers competition.
A three-time Pushcart nominee, Judith Pacht’s work includes poems published in Ploughshares, Runes, Phoebe, Cider Press Review and Foreign Literature (Moscow, Russia). Her poems have appeared in numerous anthologies including From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright (Lost Hills Press. 2007), The Poetry of Relationships (Canadian Federation of Poets, 2009), The Gastronomic Reader (University of California Press) and Tebot Bach’s Anthology of California Poets, 2003 and 2006. Writers at Work featured her poem, Surface, as their January, 2009 selection. Her chapbook, also her first poetry collection, Falcon (Conflux Press), was published in 2004. Visit her website: judithpacht.com
