Bloomfield College Alum, Asian-American Poet, Wins Prestigious Prize

BLOOMFIELD, NJ — With the capture of the prestigious Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for 2017 – along with its $25,000 award – Bloomfield College alum Patrick Rosal has come a long way from the days that he spent earning his bachelor's degree in English from the Essex County college.

Rosal, a class of 1996 graduate from Bloomfield College, now teaches English at Rutgers University-Camden and has written four, full-length poetry books. His latest collection of poems, “Brooklyn Antediluvian,” won the 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, an annual award given to the “most outstanding book of poetry” published in the United States in the previous year.

According to a Bloomfield College news release, a central part of Rosal’s prize-winning poetry collection is the exploration of his identity and experiences as a Filipino-American, traversing his childhood growing up in North Jersey and his family's roots from home to the Philippines.

Rosal said that the book is a “reflection on the aftermaths of historical ecological crises,” such as hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and Tropical Storm Ondoy in the Philippines, as well as the figurative floods that have affected him personally, such as gentrification in Brooklyn, and the emotion that washed over him as he learned to cope with heartache and loss.

Rosal, the 2017 John Simon Guggenheim Poetry Fellow and Lucas Art Fellow and former Fulbright Fellow to the Philippines, is the first Asian-American to win the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, according to Bloomfield College.

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Photo courtesy of Bloomfield College