The Council for Wisconsin Writers has singled-out Lakeland College Professor Karl Elder’s Mead: Twenty-six Abecedariums for Honorable Mention among “an admirable field of submissions” for its Posner Award of 2006.
Elder was a guest at the council’s annual banquet at the Wisconsin Club in Milwaukee earlier this month where he was presented a certificate and honorarium.
“I’m grateful for the attention Mead is receiving,” said Elder, Lakeland’s Fessler Professor of Creative Writing, the college’s Poet in Residence and a member of Lakeland’s faculty since 1979. “A poet can only hope his or her work will inspire others to scrutinize their experience, thus paying homage to the gift of being and consciousness. Besides, it’s fun.”
It has been a whirlwind year for Elder, including a feature on the Poetry Daily website, a Pushcart Prize and Pulitzer Prize nomination, the Council for Wisconsin Writers’ 2005 Lorine Niedecker Award and the 2005 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize.
In a review of Mead and Elder’s The Minimalist’s How-to Handbook, Wendy Vardaman writes, “In these two short collections Elder demonstrates his significance to poetry in Wisconsin as well as to contemporary poetry in general.”