HWS News
23 August 2024 • Faculty Babbitt Wins Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award By Andrew Wickenden '09
Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and Writing & Rhetoric Geoffrey Babbitt’s new poetic biography of English poet and artist William Blake was selected for the 2023 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award.
This spring, the poetry journal Interim named Associate Professor of English & Creative Writing and Writing & Rhetoric Geoffrey Babbitt the winner of the 2023 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award for his book, A Grain of Sand in Lambeth: The Visionary Life of William Blake.
As the winner of the Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award, Babbitt’s book will be published by the University of Nevada Press in the fall of 2025.
In his poetic biography of the great English poet and artist William Blake, Babbitt has written a book that encounters and re-creates events from the famous poet’s life. While many of Babbitt’s poems engage with Blake’s various visual artworks or are based on locations from Blake’s life that Babbitt has visited, most are concerned with Blake’s visions and visionary experiences. Blake’s philosophical system that served as the basis for those experiences is expounded in an illuminating lyric essay at the center of the book.
Interim is an international literary journal that publishes poetry, translations, criticism, reviews and hybrid texts by emerging and established writers.
The author of a previous book of poetry, Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light, Babbitt has published poems and essays in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Notre Dame Review, TYPO, Tarpaulin Sky, The Collagist, Interim, Western Humanities Review and elsewhere. Raised in Boise, Idaho, he studied at Connecticut College and earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah. He joined the HWS faculty in 2012 and serves as Editor-in-Chief of Seneca Review.
Top: Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric and English and Creative Writing Geoffrey Babbitt leads a class discussion during “Creative Writing” in Coxe Hall.
