The Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prizes are presented by the 92Y Unterberg Poetry Center and Boston Review. Many winners of this contest have gone on to distinguished careers as poets, among them Lucille Clifton, Nick Flynn, David St. John and Mark Strand.

Four winners are awarded a reading at the Poetry Center, publication in Boston Review and $500 each.

Preliminary judges are Timothy Donnelly, poetry editor at Boston Review, and Eduardo C. Corral. Final judges are John Ashbery, Susan Mitchell and Rosanna Warren.

Timothy Donnelly’s most recent collection is The Cloud Corporation, for which he won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has been honored with fellowships from the New York State Writers Institute and the Guggenheim Foundation.

2005 “Discovery” winner Eduardo C. Corral is the author of Slow Lightning, selected by Carl Phillips as the 2011 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

John Ashbery is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Quick Question: New Poems. He received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. He won the “Discovery” contest in 1952.

1979 “Discovery” winner Susan Mitchell is the author of Rapture, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Erotikon. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation.

Rosanna Warren’s most recent collection is Ghost in a Red Hat. Her awards include the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. She was selected as a “Discovery” winner in 1980.

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This contest is endowed by Joan L. and Dr. Julius H. Jacobson, II.