UNLV poet Claudia Keelan has been named this year's recipient of the Beatrice Hawley Award for her latest book, Utopic."

The award is given annually by Alice James Books for what it deems to be the best new book of poetry in the nation. The publishing house, which will issue the book in November, will sponsor a reading tour for Keelan in the spring of 2001. She also will receive a $1,000 award.

Utopic is the third book of poetry for Keelan, a UNLV associate professor of English. Her second book, The Secularist, was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times and the PEN Center awards.

Utopic is a book of poems written between Memphis, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City," said Keelan. "It's been my particular fate to live in cities which have, like it or not, utopian ideas of themselves. In Memphis it's the dream of equality, in Salt Lake city it's the myth of Zion, and, here, well, people believe that free money -- manna, if you will -- might transform them somehow. In that sense it's Las Vegas, not Wall Street, which really defines one part of the American ideal.

"I'm very glad this has happened both for myself and for UNLV," she said of the award.

The Beatrice Hawley Award is a national competition open to poets of all levels.

Alice James Books, a non-profit press and poetry cooperative, has published exclusively poetry for 25 years. It was founded in Cambridge, Mass., in 1973 by five women and two men who decided to launch a publishing venture because they felt that women's literature was not being recognized by male-dominated publishing houses.

The founders named the press after Alice James, the sister of novelist Henry James and the philosopher William James, whose fine journal and gift for writing were unrecognized within her lifetime.

For additional information on Keelan's award, call the UNLV English Department at 895-3533.