Carl Phillips Chooses Noah Warren, Yale Alum, as 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets Winner for The Destroyer in the Glass

Yale University Press is pleased to announce a winner in the 2015 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. The judge, prize-winning and critically acclaimed poet Carl Phillips, has chosen Noah Warren’s manuscript, THE DESTROYER IN THE GLASS.

Series judge Carl Phillips says: “THE DESTROYER IN THE GLASS impresses at once with its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self. The poems both examine and embody the nexus of joy and sorrow, of certainty and confusion, without which there’d be none of the restlessness that makes us uniquely human. Warren’s vision is a generous one indeed—and itself a gift.”

Yale University Press will publish THE DESTROYER IN THE GLASS in April 2016. The manuscript is Phillips’s fifth selection as judge and the 110^th volume in the series. Carl Phillips’s fourth selection, Ansel Elkins’s BLUE YODEL will be published by Yale University Press on March 31, 2015.

Noah Warren was born in Nova Scotia and grew up in Charlestown, Rhode Island. He is a graduate of Phillips Academy (Andover, MA) and of Yale, which awarded him the Frederick Mortimer Clapp Fellowship, funding a year of writing and travel. He has taught English in preparatory schools, and now lives in New Orleans. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and AGNI.

Awarded since 1919 by Yale University Press, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize celebrates the most prominent new American poets by bringing the work of these artists to the attention of the larger public. Earlier winners of the prize include such talents as Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Jack Gilbert, Jean Valentine and Robert Hass. It is the longest-running poetry prize in the United States. This year’s selection was chosen from among over 500 entries.

Yale University Press will also continue its partnership with The James Merrill House. Winners of the Series will receive one of the five writing fellowships offered at The James Merrill House in Stonington, CT. The fellowship provides a furnished living space and daily access to James Merrill’s apartment for a writer in search of a quiet setting to complete a project of literary or academic merit.