Janice N. Harrington's collection Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone was selected from over 900 manuscripts by judge Elizabeth Spires as winner of BOA's 5th annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a 2007 NEA Fellowship in Poetry and her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals. She is also the author of two children's books, Going North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004, winner of many awards including the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library) and The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007). Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and now lives in Champaign, Illinois, where she is a librarian at the Champaign Public Library.

About Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone:

"Memory, and its embodiment in a colloquial, yet highly wrought musical language are what originally drew me to Harrington's manuscript and what continues to pull me back into the poems and thrill me. We learn the story of Lillian and Webster and their children and grandchildren, a black family living a hardscrabble life in the rural South more than sixty years ago. Set on the cusp of the Civil Rights era, the poems chronicle a way of life that has long since vanished and follow the family on their eventual migration north, providing glimpses along the way of the changing times."
—Elizabeth Spires