Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award

2005 Competition Winner

The North Carolina Writers' Network would like to congratulate the winner of the Mary Belle Campbell Poetry Book Publication Award, Valentina Gnup, for her collection "Sparrow Octaves."

Valentina Gnup received her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles in 2002. She teaches writing at Greensboro College, and she is assistant editor for the poetry journal SOLO.

In 2003 she was a winner in the North Carolina Writers Network Blumenthal Writers and Readers Series. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including the Hiram Poetry Review, Nimrod, Charlotte Poetry Review, Blue Collar Review, Brooklyn Review, and Crab Orchard Review.

She received the Santa Barbara Arts Fund Individual Artist Award for poetry in 2000, the Allen Tate Memorial Award from Wind Magazine in 1995, as well as an honorable mention in the 1997 Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her manuscript Winter Octaves was a finalist in the National Poetry Series 2002, and her chapbook A Certain Piece of Sky (Mille Grazie Press Chapbook Series) was published in 1996. She and her two daughters moved from Santa Barbara, California to Greensboro, North Carolina in 2002.

Sparrow Octaves was selected from manuscripts nominated by university creative writing professors & literary editors, with Alan Michael Parker as Final Judge.

Commentary on Sparrow Octaves

In a remarkable collection of 8-line poems, resonant and capacious, and capable of preternatural lyricism, Valentina Gnup has given us a gift. Sparrow Octaves offers more than a record of grief; the poems document a loss and a period of mourning that become archetypal. Such beauty and sorrow, such resolve and surrender -- when I read poems such as these, my life seems somehow more tenuous, but more important, too, because of poetry, the lesson well-learned; to live better and love more.

Alan Michael Parker
Associate Professor of English
Davidson College, Davidson, NC