| Summer greetings from Northampton, and I hope this message finds you well. I hope too that you saw the announcement last week regarding the new literary prize from Nine Syllables Press. The Tammis Day Poetry Prize will be awarded for a debut full-length collection by a woman poet over the age of forty, with the press accepting submissions for its inaugural prize beginning in the spring of 2026. I couldn’t be happier about this news. No such literary prize yet exists in America, and it’s especially moving and gratifying to name this award after Tammis Day, a Smith College student who developed a love of poetry as an Ada Comstock Scholar under the mentorship of Annie Boutelle, the founder of The Poetry Center. During her time at Smith, Tammis herself was a founding editor of the campus literary journal Labrys, and it’s wonderful to know that her legacy will continue to create new space for the voices of historically excluded writers, as well as robust professional practice opportunities for Smith College students. Moreover, in alignment with Tammis’ passionate work as a patron of the arts, each recipient of the prize will also be awarded a two-week artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center. This expansion of Nine Syllables Press (9SP) also means an expanded role for Adrie Rose (Ada Comstock ’22), the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Adrie is the recipient of numerous literary awards, and the acclaimed author of the chapbooks Rupture (Gold Line Press, 2024) and I Will Write a Love Poem (Porkbelly Press, 2023). She’s been utterly exemplary in her work as the 9SP editor, as well as teaching the affiliated editing and book design courses and, moving forward, Adrie will also be exploring new outreach efforts aimed to help local high school students realize their own literary goals. As if all of this wasn’t enough, the first Tammis Day Poetry Prize will be selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss, and the inaugural collection will be published in the Fall of 2027, when we’ll be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Poetry Center. I hope you’ll consider supporting the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center as a means of directly supporting this new prize, and 9SP’s critical mission of addressing ongoing inequity in the publishing world by providing a new platform for the systematically excluded voices of women, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA+ poets. If you’d like to personally contribute to the work of Nine Syllables Press, please use the donate button included below. I hope you will join me in celebrating this incredible news and everything it will afford the literary community, as well as our Smith College students. Sincerely, |
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| Matt Donovan, Director of the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center |