Robbins wins Cider Press Review award

Priscilla Proctor announced to Historic City News that an assistant professor of English at Flagler College has been awarded the 2011 Cider Press Review Book Award for her manuscript “Play Button.”

Liz Robbins, Ph.D., will receive a $1,500 prize along with a standard publishing contract and 25 authors’ copies of her book, according to Proctor.

Patricia Smith, author of “Blood Dazzler,” was this year’s judge for the Cider Press Review Book Award. Smith was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Robbins said she was inspired to title her manuscript “Play Button” because technology and visualization is so prevalent in today’s society.

“I liked the idea of the title having something to do with technology because that’s where everything is going these days visually,” Robbins told Historic City News. “I was hoping for the idea that the reader would, figuratively speaking, push the play button by opening the book.”

Robbins feels as if her writing has matured since her first book of poetry, “Hope, As the World is a Scorpion Fish” – published by The Blackwater Press in 2008.

“I’m so much more excited with my latest work,” she said. “And I feel like the work in the second collection [‘Play Button’] is so much more representative of who I am as an artist. I feel as if I experimented a bit more with my work this time around.”

Robbins said with creative writing, it’s all about taking risks, and she cites her poem, “Horror Flicks, or Poem Beginning with a Line by Auden,” as an example. In “Horror Flicks,” Robbins said she challenges the readers’ imagination by leaving “gaps” to be filled.

“The poem experiments a bit with associative and dissociative leaps,” Robbins said. “In other words, I’m challenging my reader to fill in a few gaps that I intentionally leave open.”

Robbins says the poems themselves demonstrate why she was inspired to write them.

“Sometimes there are little psychological knots that I have going on internally that are so complicated and delicate in some ways that it takes working it out in a poem to get some sort of answer,” she said.” “I used to write strictly for therapeutic reasons, and as I’ve matured, I try to keep more of an audience in mind and write more toward what an audience might like to read.”

Robbins said when she first learned of her award, her first thought was of her students.

“I don’t talk to my students much about publishing, but I have taken this opportunity to talk about that and to read to them from my manuscript with the lesson being that it’s really important to celebrate your successes,” she said.

Douglas McFarland, Ph.D., director of general education and professor of English at Flagler, said the college community is very proud of Robbins’ award.

“Dr. Robbins’ achievement brings distinction to herself and consequently, to our institution,” he said. “She deserves our admiration, as well as our thanks.”

Darien Andreu, Ph.D., the English department chair and associate professor of English at Flagler, said the students find it rewarding to work with Robbins.

“Dr. Liz Robbins is one of the English Department’s many gems,” she said. “The acceptance of her second book of poetry for publication illustrates that her devotion to craft continues to gain momentum. Students find it rewarding to work with a writer who publishes so actively.”

Robbins received her B.A. in English with an emphasis in creative writing from the College of Charleston; her master’s in English with an emphasis in creative writing from University of North Florida; and her Ph.D. in creative writing from Georgia State University.

This semester Robbins is teaching composition, introduction to poetry writing and advanced poetry writing.