| Jim Handlin’s poetry is part of a permanent installation in the New Jersey Transit wing of the Penn Station Terminal in Manhattan. Through the work of commissioned Washington D.C. artist Larry Kirkland, the installation combines images and text about the state of New Jersey, including the work of twelve distinguished New Jersey writers such as Jim Handlin, William Carlos Williams, Renee Ashley, Walt Whitman and Amiri Baraka. According to Kirkland, “We’ve been touring New Jersey for three years in preparation for this project and have finally selected thirty-five images and twelve writers’ work for inclusion as etchings in a marble wall. The project has been approved by the New Jersey Council of the Arts and is representative of some of the best of the classic and contemporary poets in the state.” Handlin’s work is from “Weathervane Poem” which Kirkland chose because he thought it “would help calm the thousands of hurried people who pass by every day on their way to work.”
Over the years, Handlin has received numerous awards for his work from a variety of sources. He earned three fellowship awards (1986, 1990, 1995) from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts for outstanding selections of his work, in addition to receiving two Gusto Press awards for his haiku, the 1977 Dylan Thomas award from the New School for Social Research and in 2016 the Academy of American Poets chose a line from one of his poems to be published on their 2016 National Poetry Month poster. His haiku have been published in two books, Where the Picture Book Ends and The Distance in a Door (both Gusto Press). One of his haiku was picked as one of the best poems of 1989. He is anthologized in The Haiku Anthology, Blue Stones and Salt Hay: An Anthology of New Jersey Poets (Rutgers University Press, 1990), Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American (Penguin, 1999), Water Writes: A Hudson River Anthology (Codhill Press, 2009) and Infiltration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, 2016). One of his poems was chosen for Editor’s Choice III: Fiction, Poetry and Art from the U.S. Small Press (1984 – 1990). He has poems published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Virginia Quarterly, The Patterson Literary Review, Lips, etc. |
