Baylor professor’s book on Irish poet wins Warren-Brooks Award

Seamus Heaney’s Regions, by Richard Rankin Russell, has been selected as the 2014 winner of the Robert Penn Warren–Cleanth Brooks Award for outstanding literary scholarship and criticism.

Seamus Heaney’s Regions, by Richard Rankin Russell, has been selected as the 2014 winner of the Robert Penn Warren–Cleanth Brooks Award

Among the 21 works submitted by publishers, the committee chose Russell’s study of the Irish poet Seamus Heaney for its depth of scholarship, its perceptive analysis of works by both Heaney and his influences, and for what one juror described as “its assessment of Heaney as a poet whose work connects the local and immediate with the international and abstracting concerns of our age.”

Russell serves as the 2012 Baylor Centennial Professor of English at Baylor University, where he also directs the graduate program and chairs the Beall Poetry Festival. Seamus Heaney’s Regions has been published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

The Warren-Brooks Award, presented each year by the Robert Penn Warren Center at WKU, was established by the Warren family to honor an outstanding work of literary scholarship that embodies the spirit, scope, and integrity of the work produced by Warren and his frequent collaborator, Brooks.

Contact: Nicolette Bruner, (270) 745-2298