Wesleyan University Press announces Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem by
Rachel Trousdale as the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize.
MIDDLETOWN, CT – Wesleyan University Press announces Five-Paragraph Essay on the
Body-Mind Problem by Rachel Trousdale as the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize.
The manuscript was selected by guest judge Robert Pinsky from fifteen finalists, following an
initial screening process of 428 manuscripts. The initial screening was conducted by coeditors John Murillo, poet and Associate Professor of English at Wesleyan University; Suzanna Tamminen, Director and Editor-in-Chief of Wesleyan University Press; and Oliver Egger, Assistant Editor at Wesleyan
University Press.
Of the winning manuscript Pinsky said, “A rare gift in art is directness: to turn a clear,
unsentimental gaze on love and grief in all their variations, with no smokey or mysterioso
evasions. Almost as valuable is meaningful surprise, the stunned laughter of recognition even if
the subject for marvel is loss. The heartfelt, unpredictable poems of Rachel Trousdale attain that
kind of discovery.”
As the winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, which was open to poets aged 40 or older who have
never published a poetry book or have not published a new original poetry collection within the
last 10 years, Trousdale will receive a $1,000 cash prize and will have her manuscript published
in the acclaimed Wesleyan University Press Poetry Series in the Spring of 2025.
Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have
appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, Diagram, and other journals, as well as a chapbook,
Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone (Fishing Line Press, 2015).
Her scholarly work includes Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American
Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational
Imagination (Macmillan, 2010). Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem will be her
first full-length collection of poetry.
Thank you to Robert Pinsky and to everyone who submitted to the prize. The Cardinal
Poetry Prize is biennial and will run again in early 2026.