Palettes & Quills is delighted to have as its final judge for this poetry chapbook contest, poet Dorianne Laux.

 Dorianne Laux was born in 1952 in Augusta, Maine and is of Irish, French and Algonquin Indian heritage. Between the ages of 18 and 30 she worked as a gas station manager, sanatorium cook, maid, and doughnut-holer. A single mother, she took occasional classes and poetry workshops at the local junior college, writing poems during shift breaks. In 1983 she moved to Berkeley, California where she began writing in earnest. Supported by scholarships and grants, she returned to school when her daughter Tristem was 9, and was graduated with honors from Mills College in the Spring of 1988 with a B.A. Degree in English.

Laux's first book of poems, Awake, published by BOA Editions in 1990, was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in numerous American journals and anthologies. She has received poetry fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Laux is also the author of Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton 2005), which was the recipient of the Oregon Book Award and short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Her other collections include Smoke (BOA Editions, 2000); and What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;

Superman: The Chapbook was released by Red Dragonfly Press in January, 2008.

 

Dorianne co-authored with Kim Addonizio The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (1997). This popular book is widely used as a reference and teaching text by poets and professors.

 

Many of Dorianne's poems have been translated into French, Italian, Korean, Romanian and Brazilian Portuguese.  Among her awards are a Pushcart Prize, an Editor's Choice III Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Laux has taught at the University of Oregon's Program in Creative Writing.

She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University's MFA Program.