deborah tall lyric essay book prize

Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Kindemaur receives the award for best full-length essay for 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry.

13 July 2023 Seneca Review Lyric Essay Wins Colorado Book Award By Andrew Wickenden '09

Published by Seneca Review Books, Katherine Indermaur’s full-length lyric essay is the winner of the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry .

I/I by Katherine Indermaur was published in 2022 by Seneca Review Books after winning the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize . This spring, the book was selected by a panel of judges for the Colorado Book Award in Poetry .

Writer Kazim Ali, who selected I/ I for the Tall Prize , praised Indermaur ’s exploration of “ the mirror ’ s many dimensions — philosophical, spiritual, scientific, mythological, historical — alongside the author ’ s own experiences. ”

As the publisher notes, “ Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one's own reflection. Indermaur ' s essay, however, does more than merely problematize the contested space where the face and the mirror meet. There is also affirma tion to be found here. This is a book that thinks so keenly it breaks into song."

The Colorado Book Awards annually celebrate the accomplishments of Colorado’s outstanding authors, editors, illustrators and photographers.

Since 2018, Seneca Review Books has facilitate d the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize , a biennial book series to encourage and support innovative work in the essay. Cross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or related pieces, and “ beyond category ” projects are all within the ambit of the contest.

Seneca Review Books is an imprint of Hobart and William Smith Colleges Press , which has also published Seneca Review , the Colleges’ internationally distributed literary magazine, for more than 50 years. Known as the birthplace of the Lyric Essay, the magazine was an early champion of multimodal and hybrid-forms writing . Seneca Review has also published special issues on translation, on writing about disability and on writing that is “beyond category.” T he anthology We Might As Well Call it the Lyric Essay is a seminal text in creative nonfiction. The journal releases a fall and spring issue every year, except during the fall of even-numbered years, when the press publishes the book prize’s winner in lieu of a fall issue.

Seneca Review Books will be accepting submissions for the next iteration of the book prize until August 1, 2023. Wendy S. Walters will serve as the final judge.

Learn more about Seneca Review .

Above, Katherine Indermaur accepts the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry for her full-length lyric essay I/I , published by Seneca Review Books.

Service HWS Joins MLK March

Vice President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Bill Woodson and Chaplain and Dean for Spiritual Engagement The Rev. Nita Byrd offered remarks during Geneva’s march and memorial service in commemoration of the work of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Global-Education Five Students Earn Coveted Gilman International Scholarships

HWS students are recipients of the U.S. Department of State’s 2024 Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarships.

Internships-&-Outcomes Morgan ’21, MSM ’22 at Thrill One Sports

At the UFC headquarters in Las Vegas, Aidan Morgan ’21, MSM ’22 serves as social media coordinator for Thrill One Sports & Entertainment.

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Submissions Open for New Lyric Essay Book Prize

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Submissions are currently open for Seneca Review ’s inaugural Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize . An award of $2,000 and publication by Hobart and William Smith College Press will be given biennially for a lyric essay collection. The winner will also be invited to give a reading at Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, New York. John D’Agata will serve as final judge.

The contest accepts “cross-genre and hybrid work, verse forms, text and image, connected or related pieces, and ‘beyond category’ projects.” Using the online submission manager , submit a manuscript of 48 to 120 pages with a $27 entry fee by August 15 . The contest is open to both emerging and established writers.

Sponsored by Seneca Review in conjunction with the TRIAS residency program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the new biennial book series intends to “encourage and support innovative work in the essay.” Visit the website for complete guidelines.

For more upcoming prizes in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, visit our Grants & Awards Database and Submission Calendar .

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Colorado Poets Center

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The Colorado Poet, Issue #38, Winter 2023

Interviews by Kathryn Winograd in this issue:
Tameca L Coleman
Katherine Indermaur

Interrogating the Visual World with Katherine Indermaur: The I|I in the Looking Glass

KW : Congratulations, Katherine, for winning the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award in Poetry for the same book, I ½ I ! Your double win in two genres, I think, perfectly points out the deep “genre-mingling” between lyric essays/ poems. The Seneca Review , which was one of the first journals to “coin” the term the lyric essay and runs the Deborah Tall contest, has a wonderful description of the lyric essay on their website. Can you talk to us about writing a book that is both a vestige of the lyric essay and of the poem? In my mind, I keep seeing this image of you½you skiing along in the trough of two powerful crests that are taking you on a most difficult journey where the threat of drowning is always omnipresent. In that Seneca Review description of the lyric essay is a wonderful quote by Paul Celan that perfectly matches what I felt in your book, lyric essays or poetry: The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it .

KI : Thank you, Kathy, and thanks for spending time with me and my work. I love the lyric essay for how it refuses easy categorization—reduction of any kind. It refuses, as Deborah Tall and John D’Agata wrote on that same wonderful webpage, “the myth of objectivity.” I first started writing I|I with what I considered to be prose poems . As those began accruing and then cohering around their own logic on the subject of mirrors, I realized something bigger, something truly hybrid was at work. I approached writing I|I very much as a poet and with a poet’s training, and will admittedly bristle a bit if someone wants me to talk about the book as pure nonfiction. Along the way, I would occasionally submit excerpts of this book for publication in literary magazines under the poetry genre only to have editors ask me if they could publish it as nonfiction. Those editors helped me reconsider my own genre allegiances. Some of my favorite lyric essayists came to the form from poetry, too. I think my poetry background allows me to consider form as a world of possibility rather than only a set of conventions, and feels really well suited to this book’s interrogation of the visual world. The book also, as you mention, goes on a difficult inner journey, and the lyric essay form enabled me to approach that journey at a glancing angle, taking better care of myself and—I hope—the reader than would be typically otherwise available in more traditional forms of the personal essay.

KW : I think in talking about your book, I ½ I , I need to talk about hieroglyphics , proto-literate symbols , Elisa Gabbert’s New York Times article on poets’ punctuation as superpower and Jorie Graham’s “gaps and ciphers.” Whew. Why? Because your book creates a system of “almost-meaning” that goes far beyond just words and the traditional yoke of syntax. The title of your book introduces your complex visual manipulation of words and letters that becomes another meaning-making language in the book through typography, white space, absence of punctuation, use of a visual “eye,” odd symbolic letters that my apparently ancient eyes cannot decipher, the parenthetical, and, for gosh sakes, even a dark black penultimate page that swallows every mirror, ray of light, hum of glass that shimmers throughout the book. That was a wonderful surprise. Where in the world did that weaving of this other kind of language with its own orthography come from? How did you invent it, develop it, use it, and why?

KI : The vertical slash in the book’s title was the first experimental punctuation mark to appear in the text and really take on a dramatic life of its own. Initially I used it as a stand-in for the mirror’s surface across which personal pronouns like “I” and “my” could be reflected and doubled. Long before I had a sense of the book’s narrative arc, I felt the vertical slash propelling the project forward. The pleasure of using punctuation in this unexpected way led me to the other methods you mention: parentheses, white space, text atop text, the appearance of an actual eye, etc. And the book’s black endsheets were part of the genius of Geoffrey Babbitt at Seneca Review Books and Jeff Clark , I|I’ s designer. These methods helped me translate some of the text’s visual elements to sonic ones. It’s often surprising to folks hearing me read from the book for the first time because of the continued repetition of “I|I.” Initially it sounds like I’m stuttering, which is kind of wonderful in how it catches the listener, stutters their attention much in the same way the vertical slash does on the page. But being a lyric essay, it’s not just about the sound. I aim to have the text play with its visual characteristics like illusions play with sight, thereby revealing and resisting readers’ assumptions.

KW : So… let’s talk about intertextuality , cento-poetry , and notes. Endnotes. Your book has almost thirty numbered end notes and, within those end notes, are more notes. Not as footnotes the reader could readily access at the end of a page, but end notes, at the back of the book. As a matter of fact, nowhere in the text of your book do you indicate that a sentence or passage comes from or alludes to another source until the reader stumbles over those end notes. You’re giving your reader two different reading experiences here: the text as it stands alone (beautiful in itself) and the text buttressed by these multi-layered backstories and references to other poets and writers. How does the reader reconcile with the cento-poet’s gesture of taking ownership of text not theirs, of voices that seem in the first dive to be owned by the cento-poet and not “other”? I remember listening to a poet reading their poem and ending on such a beautiful, startling note, because, I realized later, that ending image belonged to another well-known and beloved poem. How did you find yourself maneuvering through the possible landmines of the cento-poetry gesture?

KI : I saw a tweet some years ago that made fun of poets who have lots of endnotes because it evinces self-importance, but oops—I love them. One of the first things I’ll do sometimes with a new poetry collection I’m reading is to flip to the endnotes and acknowledgements. You point to the cento, which first appears nearly a millennium ago; poetry has a long tradition of working with other texts. Instead of paraphrasing or quoting, incorporating outside language and endnoting it asks us to interrogate the way we incorporate information into our own daily thinking and being. What is creativity? What is ownership? What is new, really? Fundamentally, to write a book is to be in conversation with all books, which is such a gift. I wanted I|I to mirror outside language back to the reader. It was important to me to have other folks’ language in the book. As I write, “What I|I’m saying is that it’s not my|my language in my|my mouth. Words are reflections.” Every word has a history beneath it, and to write anything is to make a new, thin layer of that history. Alternatively, to write a word is to point to its history because every word in this book, in this interview was first said and written by someone else.

KW : MFA from Colorado State University , a couple of distinguished chapbooks, two of the big prizes for your first book, an editor for the Sugar House Review , and oh! an Academy of American Poetry prize throw in there somewhere along the line. What’s next?

KI : Thank you so much! The past couple years I’ve been mainly caring for my young daughter and dealing with all the transitions that come with new motherhood. I am slowly working on a poetry manuscript that takes up the true story of fourth-century female Christian pilgrim Egeria (which includes a cento!). My friend and former teacher, poet Mike Chitwood , told me my poems would become much shorter when I became a parent, and the vast majority of the poems in this manuscript are fewer than a dozen lines long. I’ve also been trying my hand at more essays, including one that’s forthcoming in a Torrey House Press anthology about the Great Salt Lake, edited by Michael McLane . I work best when I can keep more than one fire going, moving back and forth between them.

Online excerpt from I ½ I at NDR journal

Colorado Poets Center | Contact: [email protected]

Katherine Indermaur

I|I , selected by Kazim Ali to win the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize, is available now from Amazon or directly from Seneca Review Books.

Katherine Indermaur’s full-length debut, I|I, is a serial lyric essay that explores the mirror’s many dimensions—philosophical, spiritual, scientific, mythological, historical—alongside the author’s own experiences. Anyone who has struggled with the disconnect between their outward appearance and their inner self knows how fraught and fragmentary it can be to behold one’s own reflection. Indermaur’s essay, however, does more than merely problematize the contested space where the face and the mirror meet. There is also affirmation to be found here. This is a book that thinks so keenly it breaks into song.

Praise for I|I

“In fragments one might be known. Seen from dozens of angles, the mind may move among facets and see the whole. It is, in fact, how seeing works in the human brain anyhow. Katherine Indermaur’s I|I finds rich resonances among these disparate but not discrete shards. Rather a full shape in time and space assembles. Both the ‘lyric’ and the ‘essay’ are fully achieved, home is sought, the self seeks to connect with all of what is beyond.” —Kazim Ali, Judge, 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize

“’Every seeing distorts the world,’ writes Katherine Indermaur in I|I. Culling historical and cultural fragments of what mirrors are, as well as what they mean, Indermaur invites us to peer into longing and wonder. She pulls us in close to the reflection, asking us to look deeper into words and meaning, revealing a fragmented yet encompassing portrait of what it means to confront the self beyond the perceived ‘I.’ With an eye to both poetry and philosophy, I|I reveals the dangers of seeing, how light and reflection, once unveiled, give way to a broken and distorted existence and perception of so many unending selves. It is a delight to gaze into these mirrory fragments, seemingly stretching into infinity.” —Jenny Boully, author most recently of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

“With her meditative capture of the ways of looking, Katherine Indermaur assembles an exquisite composite of personal memory, facial (and existential) examination, etymology, and cross-cultural ways of seeing oneself in I|I. This brilliant lyric flows like a resplendent river replete with tributaries and oxbow lakes, where each bend of water orients the eye to new lines of sight. This essay is visionary, it envisions, revising its modes of seeing to query the quotidian practice of seeing oneself in a reflective surface. Reminiscent of Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book or Eliot Weinberger’s elliptical essays, Indermaur’s essaying is a facing of her subject that is ultimately uniquely her own. Here are ‘fragments’ which ‘feed out on light. On looking.’ And how transcendent the journey.” —Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of

“’If I could only see more clearly my own seeing.’ So begins Katherine Indermaur’s stunning I|I, a book that looks long, and longingly, at vision itself. In our ocularcentric world, both mirror and eye, not unlike language, are taken at face value. The eye/I of these poem-essays glides over the surface while, at the same time, ‘unsurfac[ing] things,’ ushering the reader into a depth that challenges the reign of vision. In the spirit of Levinas and Buber, Indermaur offers us a handbook of compassionate seeing, a ‘practice’ we so desperately need after these screen-filled, isolated years. ‘A practice: Tell your subject to look in your eyes. Look equally in your subject’s eyes. Look therein for your own reflected face.’ It is through such practices that we begin to see that language is both a series of relations (words are ‘cousins of wonder,’ ‘sisters’) and the very thing of which relationships are made. While Indermaur knows the complexity of these relations, she cannot help but hope, as we all should, that through them we might find one another again: ‘If only it were this clear: Sight so precise (you and I) call it a line.’” —Sasha Steensen, author most recently of Everything Awake

Poets & Writers: Literary MagNet: Katherine Indermaur
Colorado Sun: “2023 Colorado Book Awards honor winners in 16 categories at Colorado Springs celebration”
Colorado State University alumni magazine Around the Oval, summer 2023 issue

Interviews:

Sweet Lit: Interview with Katherine Indermaur: Mirrors, New Rituals, and Writing Against Shame
Poet to Poet with Radha Marcum: From Fragments to Whole: Building a Book
Colorado State University’s English Department: “In Conversation: MFA Alumna Katherine Indermaur publishes first book ‘I|I'”
The Rumpus with EJ Levy: A Reflection on Reflection: An Interview with Katherine Indermaur
rob mclennan’s blog: 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Katherine Indermaur
Colorado Review: Katherine Indermaur discusses hybridity, research, and the self
On Autofocus Lit’s The Lives of Writers podcast
Psaltery & Lyre: Looking to Mirrors, the Lyric Essay, and Punctuation: An Interview with Katherine Indermaur on “I|I”
Tarpaulin Sky: Julia Cohen’s and Abby Hagler’s Original Obsessions : An Interview with Katherine Indermaur
Colorado Poets Center, The Colorado Poet, Issue #38, Winter 2023: Interrogating the Visual World with Katherine Indermaur: The I|I in the Looking Glass
In New Delta Review by Halley McArn
In Sweet Lit by Chelsea Dingman
In Colorado Review by Linda Scheller
In Tupelo Quarterly by Esteban Rodriguez
2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize
2023 Colorado Book Award

Published Excerpts from the Book

Here are some previously published excerpts you can read online if you want a sneak peek at what’s in the book:

New Delta Review (2019)
Oxidant|Engine (2019)
Ex/Post Magazine (2022)

Additional excerpts were also published in GASHER Journal, Ghost Proposal , Coast|noCoast issue 2, Seneca Review vol. 51 no. 2 , Pulpmouth, and as a 2021 chapbook titled Facing the Mirror: An Essay (Coast|noCoast Press).