The AWP Board of Directors has selected Allison Joseph as the recipient of the 2012 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. The Award provides a $2,000 honorarium, registration, travel and accommodations for attending the AWP conference, and a lifetime membership to AWP.

The author of six collections of poetry, including Imitation of Life (Carnegie Mellon, 2003), Joseph is also well known as an editor of the Crab Orchard Review, which she has edited with her husband Jon Tribble since 1995. Through the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, she and Tribble nurture to publication two outstanding volumes of poetry each year.

Joseph has directed the creative writing program of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where as an associate professor she continues to mentor countless students. She is the founder and director of the Young Writers Workshop, an annual summer residential creative writing workshop for high school writers. Joseph has previously served on the AWP Board of Directors. In nominating her for the George Garrett Award, Joseph’s colleagues, Stacey Lynn Brown and Adrian Matejka wrote, “Her continued creative, inventive, and selfless dedication has made the literary world a more beautiful and friendly place, full of possibility and endless opportunity.” Announcing the award at the 2012 AWP Annual Conference & Bookfair, AWP Executive Director David Fenza said, “Allison Joseph is the incarnation of the better angels that animate our organization.”

The George Garrett Award is named for writer George Garrett, a founding member of AWP. For more than forty years, he taught creative writing and literature at Wesleyan University, the University of Virginia, Hollins University, and the University of Michigan, among other institutions. He was the author of more than thirty books. For years, Garrett edited Intro, an annual anthology of work by emerging writers. As a writer, teacher, mentor, and editor, he helped many young writers become major contributors to contemporary letters.