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Prestigious Pushcart Prize Awarded to Simmons Professor

BOSTON (May 14, 2008) — Afaa Michael Weaver, Simmons College professor of English and a nationally acclaimed poet, has won the Pushcart Prize, one of the literary world's most respected honors, for his poem "American Income."

Winners of the Pushcart Prize are chosen from among thousands of nominations of writers' works published each year in small magazines and presses throughout the world.  The winners' works are published annually in "The Pushcart Prize," an anthology of stories, poems, essays and memoirs that is called "the most eagerly awaited collection of the year" by Booklist, and "much of the best writing available in this country" by the "New York Times Book Review."

Weaver's poem, which is included in his 2007 collection of poetry "The Plum Flower Dance," will be published in "Pushcart Prize XXXIII: Best of the Small Presses," to be released December 2008.

Weaver, director of the Simmons College Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center and holder of the endowed chair Alumnae Professor of English at Simmons, has published nine collections of poetry and has been nominated several times for a Pulitzer Prize.  He was featured on the December cover of the national "Poets & Writers" magazine as a gifted poet, noted for his poignant and delicate observations, his sense of freedom, his portraits of African-American history and culture, and his ability to get beyond the sentimental and banal.  

Simmons College is a nationally recognized private university in Boston.  It includes an undergraduate college for women and graduate programs for women and men in social work, health studies, management, library and information science and the liberal arts.