BU Creative Writing

“The Dress Code,” a poem by Caitlin Doyle (Poetry 2008), which originally appeared in The Yale Review, has been awarded a Pushcart Prize Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XLIII: Best of the Small Presses (W.W. Norton & Co, 2019).

The Pushcart Prize series honors the best literary work published each year by small presses around the country. Caitlin is in impressive company as the recipient of a 2019 Special Mention, along with Carolyn Forche, David Wojahn, Ilya Kaminski, Bob Hicock, and Patricia Smith, among other notable poets!

In Poetry Sunday last March, poet and critic Rebecca Foust highlighted Doyle’s “The Dress Code,” which is a villanelle, as an example of how “form can set you free in your writing and reading of poetry.” According to Foust, the poem’s “repetitions build an echo chamber resulting in sonic saturation that creates anxiety and urgency,” a series of artful aural effects that “keep tension taut in the poem.”

Click here to read Caitlin’s poem “The Dress Code.”

Congratulations, Caitlin!

Caitlin Doyle is currently completing a PhD in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati, where she holds an Elliston Fellowship in Poetry and serves as an Associate Editor of The Cincinnati Review. Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Threepenny Review, Boston Review, Best New Poets (University of Virginia Press), and elsewhere. Her work has also been featured through the PBS NewsHour Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, and the Poetry Foundation’s “Poem of the Day” series. She has received awards and fellowships through the James Merrill House, the Yaddo Colony, the MacDowell Colony, the Jack Kerouac House, The Frost Farm, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the P.E.O. Scholar Foundation, among others.  She earned her MFA in Poetry from Boston University as the George Starbuck Fellow in Poetry.