Professor wins poetry award

Weston Cutter, author and Northwestern College English professor, received a $2,500 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in February.

Three poems by Cutter, Pumpernickel, So Perhaps (After CL) and Spring Prayer, were selected by judges and published at dorothyprizes.org among submissions by poets from London, Brooklyn, San Francisco and Seattle.

Dorothy Sargent Fraser Rosenberg wrote poetry but was not widely published. After she died in 1969, her husband, a University of California–Berkeley professor, together with her son privately published a selection of her poems. When Marvin Rosenberg died in 2003, his estate established a memorial fund in his late wife’s name to “award prizes to young poets with unusual promise.”

Cutter’s poems, fiction, essays, book reviews, and interviews with writers and musicians have been published in numerous journals and magazines. He was included in Best New Poets 2008, and two of his poems were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in both 2008 and 2007.

Cutter earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Virginia Tech and a bachelor’s degree in English from Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota. He teaches creative and nonfiction writing at Northwestern and also advises the Beacon student newspaper.