Professor wins prestigious poetry contest, will read at festival

Posted: Jan. 26, 2012

Marilyn Annucci, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, won first prize and $1,000 in the 2012 Hill-Stead Museum Sunken Garden Poetry Contest with her manuscript "Waiting Room."

"I feel honored that my manuscript was chosen as I know how competitive literary competitions are," Annucci said. "I am especially pleased because the judge, Tony Hoagland, is a poet whose work I appreciate. I'm glad my work resonated with his sensibility."

The museum will publish Annucci's collection of poems, and she will perform an introductory reading at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in June in Farmington, Conn. Annucci will precede the evening's featured poet, Christian Wiman. Wiman is the editor of Poetry magazine, which was founded in Chicago by Harriet Monroe in 1912 and is the oldest monthly publication devoted to poetry in the English-speaking world.

Annucci, an associate professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures, said she draws her inspiration from everyday life and experiences, as well as from what she's read or seen, and even dreamt. She also likes to work on a series of poems because she can use the subject not only as a way to address the topic itself, but also as a vehicle for talking about something larger.

"My poems often reflect my intellectual and emotional obsessions, and some of my sense of humor," Annucci said about the tone of her poems. "Mostly, I have always been a curious and philosophical person. I am deeply interested in what it means to be human - those things that bind us or mark us by a time and culture as well as those that suggest larger, universal experiences and questions of the soul."