"Pursue, keep up with, circle round and round your life as a dog does his master’s chair. Do what you love. Know your own bone; gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still. Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life so. Aim above morality. Be not simply good—be good for something."
~ Henry David Thoreau
Alice Friman's new book On the Overnight Train: New and Selected Poems out in February 2024 from LSU Press is winner of the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, 2025. It is available at LSU Press, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.
She is the author of eight full-length books, including Blood Weather, which was published by LSU Press in 2019, and is available to order here. Other books from LSU include The View from Saturn and Vinculum, which won the 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. Inverted Fire and The Book of the Rotten Daughter are from BkMk Press, and Zoo was published by The University of Arkansas Press. She is a recipient of two Pushcart Prizes and is included in The Best American Poetry.
Other awards include three prizes from The Poetry Society of America: the Consuelo Ford Award, the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, and the Lucille Medwisk Memorial Award. From The New England Poetry Club, she has received the Gretchen Warren Award, the Firman Houghton Award, and twice the Erika Mumford Prize. She was also awarded the 2001 James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry from Shenandoah and the Ekphrasis Prize for Poetry from Ekphrasis. She won the Paumanok Award and the first prize from the Houston Public Library's Public Poetry Contest for poems about wit, and she's been included in the 2018 Best of the Net Anthology. She has received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, VCCA, and the Bernheim Foundation.