Vermont Resident Wins the Robert Penn Warren Award For Poetry

VERMONT RESIDENT WINS THE ROBERT PENN WARREN AWARD FOR POETRY -- (Extensions of Remarks - September 08, 2004)

Mr. SANDERS. Mr. Speaker, it is my pleasure today to commend a Vermont resident, Harriet McGraw, known to her friends as Hatsie, for winning the Robert Penn Warren Award for poetry. Her poem, "Neighbors in the North End," was selected as the best of 853 submissions in a competition which saw entrants from 252 poets from 42 states and foreign nations. The competition was sponsored by the New England Writers Conference.

Hatsie McGraw lives in Windsor and works in nearby Springfield, where she is the librarian at the Park Street School. She represents part of what is best about our state: an ongoing creativity that is the hallmark of much in Vermont, a creativity which brings forth not just poetry but handbuilt furniture, innovative small businesses, and popular music. As just one instance of that creativity let me cite her husband Tom, a painter whose works in mixed media were recently exhibited in a show of his work, "Elements of Diversion," at the New England Gallery.

We in Vermont are proud of Hatsie McGraw, and of the countless thousands like her who move ever onward in search of new things to do, new heights to scale, new skills to put to use.