Anne Elvey Wins International Prize
in Poetry Competition

Anne Elvey, of Seaford, Victoria, has placed first in the international category of the Leaf Press Overleaf Chapbook Competition, which awards a publishing contract to two poets each year. "Judging was blind," said publisher Ursula Vaira, "but I wasn't surprised when I found out the winning manuscript came from Australia. Leaf Press has a long history of appreciating the Australian poets."

Elvey's chapbook, which is called "This Flesh That You Know," will be published at the end of May, 2015. Part of the prize is some cash for a good launch party. Ursula Vaira hopes to see some photographs, at least, though she won't be able to attend.

 

The manuscript brings together poems about relationships with family in the wider context of attentiveness to things and how the intricacies of things shape our human connections. There are echoes of wider issues of the effects of war, climate change and white privilege. Human relationships are lived in habitats, in contexts that are always more than human.

Anne Elvey is a writer, editor and researcher from Melbourne, Australia, with honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity, and interests in ecopoetics and ecological criticism. She is author of a poetry collection Kin (Five Islands Press, 2014) and three previous chapbooks, and co-editor of Climate Change—Cultural Change: Religious Responses and Responsibilities (Wipf and Stock, 2013). Her poems were shortlisted in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2012 and the Newcastle Poetry Prize 2011. She was recipient of a Writers Victoria Writing@Rosebank fellowship in 2011. Anne is managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. She lives in Seaford, Victoria (Australia) with her partner Greg Price and two adult sons.

About the Publisher: Leaf Press is an independent poetry publisher located on Vancouver Island, BC. Canada. Leaf publishes trade titles as well as chapbooks and a weekly online "Monday's Poem."

Leaf Press
www.leafpress.ca
250 390-3028
poems@leafpress.ca