May 4, 2007
Director of Media Relations
413/542-8417

AMHERST, Mass.—Emma Gorenberg, a graduating senior at Amherst College, was a winner of the Kathryn Irene Glascock ’22 Intercollegiate Poetry Competition at Mount Holyoke College last weekend. A graduate of Martha’s Vineyard High School, Gorenberg is the daughter of David Gorenberg (Amherst ’65) and Leslie Baker of West Tisbury, Mass. Gorenberg shared the prize with Sarah Twombly of Mount Holyoke College.

The title of Gorenberg’s senior honors thesis in English, a collection of her poetry, is “Of this Lineage,” a phrase she says refers to her interest in formal verse. The poems for which she received the Glascock Prize are among those in her thesis collection. Her academic advisor, Daniel Hall, the writer-in-residence at Amherst and author of Under Sleep (2007) and other poetry, says Gorenberg “is one of the best poets I’ve taught at Amherst; not coincidentally, she is also one of the hardest working. She knows how high the standards are and pushes herself relentlessly, particularly in revising her poems.”

An avid horsewoman who competes in dressage, Gorenberg has contemplated a career in veterinary medicine and prepared for that by studying some biology at Amherst. She is completing a double major in English and political science, a field she fell for after taking a class in “The American Presidency” during the 2004 election.

Having spent her senior year writing “Of this Lineage” and now winning the Glascock Prize, Goreneberg is thinking about pursuing her poetic muse. She also played rugby at Amherst College—second row with the women’s side—and spent a semester last year studying politics and English in England.

First held in 1923 as a memorial to Kathryn Irene Glascock, a 1922 graduate of Mount Holyoke College, a promising young poet who died shortly after her graduation, the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition has long connected talented student poets with distinguished professional poets. Illustrious judges have included Robert Frost, Marianne Moore and Seamus Heaney; Sylvia Plath and James Merrill are past winners.

This year’s Glascock judges were poets Elizabeth Alexander, Annie Boutelle and W.D. Snodgrass.

In addition to Gorenberg and Twombly, the student contestants were Deborah Beth Medows of Brandeis University, Mark Parlette of the College of William and Mary, Philip Matthew of Temple University and Noel Tague of the University of New Hampshire.

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