The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English.
Dear Blackbird, is the 2006 prize-winning volume selected by this year's judge, J. D. McClatchy, editor of The Yale Review.

Jane Springer grew up in a myriad of small towns in Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. A doctoral candidate, she currently teaches English in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee.