NEWS

From Dana Gioia, Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts:

It is with deepest sorrow that I announce that Cliff Becker, Director of Literature at the National Endowment for the Arts, died on May 17, 2005, of a heart attack.

We are heartbroken by Cliff's sudden and untimely death. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family. All of us at the NEA grieve with them at this great loss.

Cliff was an important part of the fabric and personality of the Arts Endowment. He was beloved by his colleagues. And he loved them. During his 13 years at the Endowment, he nurtured our Literature programs with an understanding of how literature can open the heart and mind to a new and greater understanding of the world. He was widely respected in the field for his regard not only for the written word, but also for those who write and those who read. He will be missed deeply.

Awards for Previous Blackbird Contributors

Lisa Russ Spaar (Vol. 2. No, 2) has selected The Garden Room by Joy Katz (Vol. 3, No. 1) as winner of the 2005 Tupelo Press Snowbound Series Chapbook Award. Ms. Katz will receive $1,000 and her book will be published in fall, 2006, and distributed nationally by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.

Cecily Parks (Vol. 4, No. 1) has been awarded a chapbook fellowship from the Poetry Society of America. Li-Young Lee selected her manuscript, Cold Work.

Lily Tuck (Vol. 1, No. 1) received the 2004 National Book Award for The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins, 2004).

Beckian Fritz Goldberg (Vol. 1, No. 1) recently won the eighth annual FIELD Poetry Prize from Oberlin College Press.

Joshua Poteat (Vol. 2, No. 1) recently was awarded the Anhinga Press Poetry Prize for a first or second book for his first collection, Ornithologies. He also recently received the National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America (judged by Mary Oliver).

Recent Books by Previous Blackbird Contributors

2005
Lie Awake Lake (Oberlin College Press, 2005), by Beckian Fritz Goldberg (Vol. 1, No. 1)

Laws Of My Nature (Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 2005), by Margot Schilpp (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Whores on the Hill (Vintage, 2005), by Colleen Curran (Vol. 2, No. 2)

2004
Breath (Knopf, 2004), by Philip Levine (Vol. 1, No. 1; Vol. 3, No. 2)

A Home for Wayward Girls (winner of the 2004 New Issues Poetry Prize), by
   Kevin Boyle (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Lark Apprentice (New Issues Press, 2004), by Louise Mathias (Vol. 2, No. 2)

Loew's Triboro (New Directions Publishing, 2004), by John Allman (Vol. 2, No. 1)

The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins, 2004), by Lily Tuck (Vol. 1, No. 1)

Ordinary Mornings of a Coliseum (Copper Canyon, 2004), by Norman Dubie
   (Vol. 1, No. 2; Vol. 2, No. 1; Vol. 2, No. 2)

To the Green Man (Sarabande Books, 2004), by Mark Jarman (Vol. 1, No. 1;
   Vol. 1, No. 2)

2003
Assignation at Vanishing Point (Elixir Press, 2003), by Jane Satterfield (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Florida (TriQuarterly Books, 2003), by Christine Schutt (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Goldbeater's Skin (Center for Literary Publishing, 2003), by G. C. Waldrep
   (Vol. 2, No. 2)

Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived (Perennial, 2003), by Lily Tuck (Vol. 1 No. 1)

Swoon (University of Chicago Press, 2003), by Victoria Redel (Vol. 1, No. 2)

Lives of Water (Carnegie Mellon University, 2003), by John Hoppenthaler
   (Vol. 1, No. 1)

2002
Prism (Arctos Press, 2002), by David St. John (Vol. 1, No. 1)

Blackbird and LOCKSS

In the summer of 2003, Vicky Reich of Stanford University contacted Blackbird to ask our participation in beta testing of the LOCKSS Program. LOCKSS (short for Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is both a system and a software created to safeguard electronic publications. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and Sun Microsystems, the LOCKSS Program Team is building a distributed digital archive system for electronic journals and other important web documents. A consortium of participating libraries all over the world will manage their own storehouses for digital material by using the LOCKSS software, which not only preserves electronic journal content, but also constantly compares the copies in these digital "caches" for integrity.

Panelists from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and four other universities had gathered on the literary librarian team to select 50 titles based on "intellectual merit." The LOCKSS technical team further reviewed and narrowed this list based on "publisher technical competence." Blackbird was one of only two literary journals selected for inclusion.

Beta testing has now been concluded. On April 5, 2004, the LOCKSS Program released the first version production of the LOCKSS software.