ITHACA, N.Y. -- Great poetry still matters even in these most bellicose of times. To wit: Alice Fulton, professor of English at Cornell University, has been awarded the 2002 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry for her 2001 book of poetry, Felt . The prestigious $10,000 biennial prize, sponsored by the Library of Congress, will be presented to Fulton on Thursday, Dec. 5, at 8 p.m. in the Mumford Room of the James Madison Building in Washington, D.C. Fulton will read from her works, and a public reception will follow.

The Bobbitt prize recognizes the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the previous two years. Fulton was chosen by a three-member jury of American poets appointed in July by a selection committee composed of the librarian of Congress, the poet laureate consultant in poetry, a publisher named by the Academy of American Poets and a literary critic nominated by the Bobbitt family.

In awarding the prize, poets David Baker, Eamon Grennan and Heather McHugh, members of the Bobbitt prize jury, stated, "Alice Fulton's latest collection … is blessed with the kind of direct wiring between sensation and language, feeling and form, that strikes first with physical and then with intellectual and emotional wallop. Hers is a poetic sensibility at once remarkably comprehensive and remarkably precise, and Felt , her best book so far, is possessed of great velocity, great staying-power."

Fulton, who joined the Cornell faculty in 2001, sees the award as an honorary symbol or distinction that helps to enhance her role as a teacher.

"When I was a student and one of my teachers won an award, I felt honored by association," said Fulton. "Prizes confer authority, and a teacher can use the strength of an award to convey important ideas that otherwise might not be heard or respected. It's possible to use the cultural endorsement of an award to counter cultural banalities and cruelties. For instance, I like to encourage students to write what I've called a 'poetry of inconvenient knowledge' so that their writing becomes a conscientious as well as a sublime force. Maybe an award can amplify this difficult request. As to the $10,000 that comes with the prize, as Bugs Bunny said, 'That's a lot of carrots.'"

Robert Morgan, Cornell's Kappa Alpha Professor of English, said the prize "… continues a tradition started by Archie [A.R.] Ammons and makes a great difference to our students, particularly the graduates students in the Creative Writing Program. It's also a fact that Alice was once a student here at Cornell herself, and that speaks to the strength of our department."

The late Ammons, who was the Goldwin Smith Professor of Poetry at Cornell, received the Bobbitt Prize in 1993 for his book-length poem "Garbage." Ammons died in 2000 and left a daunting legacy at Cornell. As heir to that legacy, Fulton has carried the torch while pioneering her own brand of word magic beyond the orbit of her former mentor and predecessor.

In addition to its selection for this year's Bobbitt Prize, Felt was chosen by the Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 2001 and as a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry. Fulton's other collections include Sensual Math (1995); Powers of Congress (1990; reissued 2001); Palladium (1986), winner of the 1985 National Poetry Series and the 1987 Society of Midland Authors Award; and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina (1983; reissued 1996), winner of the 1982 Associated Writing Programs Award. She also is the author of a collection of prose, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry (1999).

Fulton is the recipient of many other awards and honors, including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michigan Society of Fellows and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her work has been included in five editions of The Best American Poetry series and in the 10th anniversary edition, The Best of the Best American Poetry, 1988-1997 , edited by Harold Bloom. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the Bess Hokin award from Poetry , the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review , and the Emily Dickinson and Consuelo Ford Awards from the Poetry Society of America. Fulton is the seventh Bobbitt prize winner.

The $10,000 prize is given by the family of the late Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt of Austin, Texas, in her memory. She was the late President Lyndon B. Johnson's sister and, while a graduate student in Washington, D.C., during the 1930s, was an employee of the Library of Congress, where she met co-worker and college student O.P. Bobbitt, whom she later married.