Hey, if I were a poet, I’d be polishing a manuscript right this very second to send to Graywolf Press. D.A. Powell has just been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his collection, "Chronic." It's the second year in a row that a Graywolf poet has won the prestigious award.

The prize, presented by Claremont Graduate University, is a cool $100,000, and a pile of cash that big hardly ever lands in the hands of a poet, so Graywolf clearly has some powerful acquisition mojo going on.

Last year’s winner was Matthea Harvey, for "Modern Life." In January, Powell’s "Chronic" was also nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the second time he’s been nominated; the first time was in 2004 for "Cocktails," also a Graywolf title. Eula Biss and Stephen Burt, two other Graywolf authors, also earned nominations, so the Graywolf staff is riding a well-deserved wave of euphoria. They know how to pick ‘em.

“It's tremendous when we take on a writer's first or second book and see them progress from winning those early prizes or getting strong early attention and sales to then winning a major prize. That is an indication to us that supporting these kinds of authors book to book over a long term is a powerful and rare model for literary publishing,” says Jeff Shotts, senior editor at Graywolf.

“Other than that, it's the willingness to take on challenging, risky, and singular works that characterizes Graywolf's acquisitions process. That doesn't always result in big awards or huge sales numbers, of course. But it does mean that with a lot of resilience and patience, sometimes it can.”