Elizabeth Hazen Announced as a Finalist for the 2019 Baker Award
The 2019 Baker Award finalists have been announced!
The Baker Awards are the premier honors for artists working and living in the greater Baltimore area. Past awardees in music include jazz pianist and music club stalwart, Lafayette Gilchrist, and avant garde pedal steel virtuoso, Susan Alcorn. Winners of the Baker Literary prize include poet and Iowa Writer's alum Dora Malech and novelist Timmy Reed.
This year, ASP's own Elizabeth Hazen, author of the poetry collection Chaos Theories, is a finalist for the $10,000 literary honor. Hazen is a Baltimore resident and ardent supporter of the city's burgeoning arts scene (named by Thrillist and Departures magazines as one of the best arts cities in America). She received her MFA from Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches English at the Calvert School in Baltimore.
From the Baker Awards Official Site:
The 2019 Baker Artist Awardees will be announced on a special episode of Maryland Public Television's Artworks program, which will air on May 17, 2019 at 7:30pm.
Finalists have also been invited to participate in a variety of showcases that will take place throughout Baltimore in the coming months. Stay tuned!
More From Elizabeth Hazen
Baltimore poet, Elizabeth Hazen’s first collection of poems is entitled Chaos Theories. Last week the young poet was announced as a finalists for the prestigious Baker Artist Award in literature. We sat down to talk with her about her experience in Baltimore as an artist and what programs like The Baker Awards mean to artists.
Fully embracing what the lyric mode does best, Hazen provides the readers with brief, intense poems that preserve a suspended moment in time, attempting to record the thought processes and emotions of the speaker much like tree rings reveal drought, heat, and age. With astonishing clarity and concision, Hazen explores the mysteries of our realities—which are ultimately beholden to entropy.
This is no modern tradition, says Elizabeth Hazen. It is not only now that humans ornament their dead with flowers. “See,” she says in her rumination on tradition and humanity, Burial at Shanidar, “Even from a distance we dream of gardens where there should be stone.” And on Christmas especially, it is so wonderful to curl up with a book of poetry, even to read out-loud to one’s family, and bask in the ways we make words, just like the long winter days of dark, meaningful with light and tradition.