David Rigsbee To Win the Sam Ragan Award

David Rigsbee, winner of the Spring, 2009 Black River Chapbook Competition, will be honored with the Sam Ragan Award for Distinguished Service to North Carolina Arts on Thursday, February 4 at St. Andrews College in Laurinburg, North Carolina.

The award honors Sam Ragan, who was North Carolina’s first Secretary of Cultural Resources. It also celebrates North Carolina as the first state in the union to create a cabinet-level position for the fine arts.

David Rigsbee is the author of seven previous full-length collections of poems.  He is also the author of four chapbooks, two works of criticism (on Carolyn Kizer and Joseph Brodsky, whom he also translated), and editor of two anthologies, the most recent of which, Invited Guest: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Southern Poetry (The University of Virginia Press in 2001) was named a notable university press book by the American Library Association.  Winner of the Pound Prize and the Vachel Lindsay Award, he has been been recipient of grants and awards from the N.E.A., the N.E.H., The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Virginia Commission on the Arts, The Djerassi Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Ohio Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and many others. His chapbook The Pilot House is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press.

After the presentation of the award on February 4, Rigsbee will give a reading during the Fortner Writer’s Forum. The event, to be held in the Orange Main Lounge, will begin at 8 PM. It is free and open to the public.