Nationally known poet and West Virginia University graduate Maggie Anderson was recently awarded the Helen and Laura Krout Memorial Ohioana Poetry Award.

Her latest book is a collection of her work, Windfall: New and Selected Poems, and was published in 2000. Anderson has also written Cold Comfort, A Space Filled with Moving, and is the editor of Hill Daughter: New and Selected Poems of Louise McNeill, and the co-editor of A Gathering of PoetsLearning By Heart: Contemporary American Poetry About School. She has received other awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She was a Distinguished Visitor at WVU as part of the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Visitors Program.

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p. Anderson was born in New York City and was raised in West Virginia. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in English at WVU . Currently, she is an associate professor of English at Kent State University where she teaches creative writing, directs the highly regarded Wick Poetry Program and edits the Wick Poetry Series. Anderson, who has lived in Kent since 1989, is the 19th Ohio poet to receive this prestigious award.

The Ohioana Poetry Award was created in 1984 and is presented annually to an Ohio poet whose published work made and continues to make a significant contribution to poetry or that helps develop an interest in poetry. In order to receive this award, the poet must be an Ohio resident for at least five years, have demonstrated a distinguished publishing record, have work that has made, and continues to make, a significant contribution to poetry, developed an interest in poetry through his/her work, and achieved recognition inside and outside the State of Ohio.