CSI English Professor Wins Whiting Writers' Award

January 28, 2008

Cate Marvin, an Assistant Professor of English and Assistant Chair of the department at the College of Staten Island, has recently received a prestigious Whiting Writers' Award for poetry.

"I feel pretty great about having received it," Marvin says. "This is a tremendous honor and recognition of many, many years of work. This award was not just for my second book, but for my career in general...It's also significant because all of the people who have won this award are writers that I deeply respect." Marvin added that "the award will give me time to write, which is the most important thing to me."

Since 1985, the award, which includes a $50,000 prize, has been given by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation annually “to ten emerging writers in fiction, poetry, and plays. The awards…are based on accomplishment and promise.”

Marvin was also honored in 2000 with a Kathryn A. Morton Prize for her first book, "World's Tallest Disaster," published by Sarabande Books in 2001. In 2002, she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize.

Her poems have appeared in "The New England Review," "Poetry," "The Kenyon Review," "Fence," "The Paris Review," "The Cincinnati Review," "Slate," "Verse," "Boston Review," "Ninth Letter," and forthcoming works will be published in "TriQuarterly." Her second book of poems, "Fragment of the Head of a Queen," was published in August 2007 by Sarabande.

# # #