Prof. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, English, was chosen among hundreds of contestants as one of the five finalists in the 2009 National Book Award for Poetry last Wednesday for her poetry collection Open Interval.

“Like the Romare Bearden paintings she writes about in Open Interval, Van Clief-Stefanon’s work is colorful, sometimes playful, grounded in reality, yet other-worldly at the same time,” the National Book Foundation’s website states.

The National Book Award spans four categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry and Young People’s Literature. Only books written by American citizens and published in the United States are eligible for the award, according to the National Book Foundation’s website.

An independent panel of four poets will decide on the final winner, whose name will be revealed on Nov. 18. The winner will be presented a bronze sculpture and a $10,000 monetary prize at an awards ceremony, but other finalists will also receive a prize of $1,000, a medal and a citation from the panel jury.

Previous National Book Award winners affiliated with Cornell include the late former Prof. A.R. Ammons, English, who received the poetry award twice, once in 1973 and once in 1993, and acclaimed writer Thomas Pynchon ’59, whose novel Gravity’s Rainbow won the fiction award in 1974.

This year, the four other finalists for the poetry award are Rae Armantrout for Versed, Ann Lauterbach for Or to Begin Again, Carl Phillips for Speak Low and Keith Waldrop for Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy.

Van Clief-Stefanon graduated with a B.A. in English from Washington and Lee University and received her MFA from Penn State, according to the Writers at Cornell website. Her first work, Black Swan, won the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Four years later, she was among the 20 writers featured in the Poetry Society of America Festival of New American Poets.

Apart from teaching creative writing courses, writing seminars and a MFA course on poetry at Cornell, Van Clief-Stefanon is also working on her third poetry collection, The Coal Tar Colors, and a collection of essays. She is also a member of the Cornell University Creative Writing faculty and will make a public reading this Wednesday along with fiction writers H.G. Carrillo and Prof. J. Robert Lennon, English, in a Fall 2009 Reading Series event.