New York, August 29, 2006—The Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine are pleased to announce the finalists for the 2006 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a $25,000 award for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States in the previous year. The finalists, chosen from more than 150 entries, are:

Christian Barter, The Singers I Prefer (CavanKerry Press)
Jack Gilbert, Refusing Heaven (Knopf)
Dorianne Laux, Facts About the Moon (W.W. Norton)
Eleanor Lerman, Our Post Soviet History Unfolds (Sarabande Press)
Ron Slate, The Incentive of the Maggot (Mariner Books)

I am especially pleased to see Ron and Dorianne's books on this list. I thought they were both excellent. I'd be happy to see either one win.