Highland Park High School Teacher Wins Poetry Award

HIGHLAND PARK, IL — A Highland Park High School English teacher has been awarded a prize for an outstanding new collection of poetry by an American poet by a London-based independent house. The 2017 Sexton Prize for Poetry was awarded to The Displaced Children of Displaced Children by Faisal Mohyuddin. The Sexton Prize for Poetry celebrates a collection by an American poet, with a prize of $1000 US dollars and publication by Eyewear, with distribution in America by SPD and in the UK and Ireland by Central Books.

The Displaced Children of Displaced Children will be published in early 2018, in time for AWP, and formally launched in London. Last year’s inaugural winner was American Purgatory by Rebecca Gayle Howell, which has gone on to be a best seller.

“Mohyuddin's craft is composed of measurable touches that go hardly noticed. And the subject! Serious stuff, yes, but the collection contains a variety of tones and concerns. There is the jelly-fish in space (lament though the poem may be), a talking banana, binging on pumpkin pie," said Professor Kimiko Hahn, a Distinguished Professor in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York.

Hahn has published nine collections of poetry, including Brain Fever in 2014 and Toxic Flora in 2010 and been the recipient of the American Book Award and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2016, she was elected president of the Poetry Society of America.

"To be sure, the title refers to diaspora and the poems refer to families in and immigrants from Pakistan. There are a literal landscapes and clear memories to be enjoyed. And yet, because these poems are so well crafted and the emotion so well expressed, the subject matter is overtaken by such themes as boundary, legacy, loss, claim. Whether a long narrative poem, or shorter lyric poems, these are the works of a poet, mature in his concerns and thinking,” Hahn said of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children.

Highland Park High School teacher Faisal Mohyuddin is the author of the chapbook The Riddle of Longing, forthcoming this fall from Backbone Press. He was the recipient of the 2014 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner, and his work has appeared in Narrative, RHINO, Catamaran, Chicago Quarterly Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review and Atlanta Review, amongst others. Faisal lives with his wife and son in Chicago and is a proud American Muslim of Pakistani descent.

“For years I have turned to Kimiko Hahn’s poetry to find beauty, inspiration, love, and, above all, a feeling of home. Few poets’ work moves me the way her work moves me. So when I learned Professor Hahn had selected my collection as the winner of the 2017 Sexton Prize, I was incredibly honored, elated, and quite honestly flabbergasted," Mohyuddin said of his win.

"This is undoubtedly an amazing honor, the depths of which I cannot fully grasp. For that, I am profoundly grateful to Professor Hahn and to everyone at Eyewear,” he said.

The runners up are The Tilt Torn Away From the Seasons by Elizabeth Lindsay Rogers and Truce Country by Su Hyon Bae, who will both receive an offer of publication along with a $200 advance from Eyewear. The shortlist this year was remarkably diverse and competitive, and Professor Hahn remarked: “In a very rich and complex group of collections, these still stood out for me.”

Eyewear Publishing was founded in 2012 by Cambridge writer-in-residence Dr Todd Swift, and publishes work by leading poets including Paul Muldoon, George Szirtes, George Elliott Clarke, Hester Knibbe, Sumia Sukkar, Don Share, Keaton Henson, Jan Owen, Mark Ford and Elspeth Smith.

“We are thrilled at Professor Hahn’s choice, and delighted to have had the pleasure of receiving so many high quality submissions. Mr Mohyuddin’s work is of extraordinary quality, and resounds with our times. We look forward to working with him and bringing this book out early next year,” Swift said.

» via Eyewear Publishing, Highland Park High School

_{Top photo courtesy District 113 , Faisal Mohyuddin}