The Village of New Ghosts is attuned to the destabilizing experience of loss. Time, and the poet's sense of it, has shifted, and she is newly awake.

Winifred Hughes is winner of Passager's 2024 Henry Morgenthau III First Book Poetry Prize for a poet 70 or older, the only prize of its kind in the United States. With this national prize, established in 2018, Passager continues its mission of bringing the compelling writing and insight of older generations to the public.

Hughes writes that now in her 70s, she is faced with "the confrontation of unimaginable loss. But there is also a sense of being an experienced writer, which comes with a freedom from youthful ambition or trying to build a career."

Grace Cavalieri, contest judge and former Maryland Poet Laureate, said, "Poetics that bring emotional worlds into existence have to be held in place with mastery. Someone is obviously in charge of this work. Someone is in control of its precise syntax and beautiful heart. I never wanted to stop reading."

Winifred (Winnie) Hughes is a reformed academic and active birder living in Princeton, NJ. Winnie comes from a "whole family of scribblers": her mother Josephine Nicholls Hughes was a poet, her father Riley Hughes, a novelist, and her three siblings, all writers, including her sister Hildred Crill, a poet who lives in Stockholm. Currently she teaches nature writing and ecopoetry at the Watershed Institute in Pennington, NJ, and leads many bird walks in the local open spaces. She is author of two prize-winning chapbooks, Frost Flowers (2019) and Nine-Bend Bridge (2015). The Village of New Ghosts is her first full-length collection of poetry, and Passager's Henry Morgenthau III Poetry Prize winner for a first book of poems by a poet 70 or older.

Winnie is a longtime member of U.S. 1 Poets Cooperative, established in the 70s, dedicated to fostering new poets. She was married to the late Fred Spar; their two grown sons are Adam and Alex Spar.

"The task of 'the poet' is brilliantly fulfilled with sonics, structure, detail, richness and care. But where this book truly exceeds and excels is in creating a hologram of emotions, a reality we can enter, where aesthetics are crisp and clear enough to create a new paradigm. Poetics that bring emotional worlds into existence have to be held in place with mastery. Someone is obviously in charge of this work. Someone is in control of its precise syntax and beautiful heart. I never wanted to stop reading." - Grace Cavalieri

"In Hughes' work we enter into a stunning linguistic and emotional landscape of give and take, of push and pull, each step forward a constant realignment of understanding of nature and history, of temporality itself. 'How can I lose what has not been?' Hughes writes. And 'Will I simply step out of / chronology?' The Village of New Ghosts moves brilliantly by way of questioning. There is a hesitation, a shifting back and forth between the known and the unknowable, what can be reached and that which one, despite all odds, continues moving towards. Everything 'still so familiar, yet so estranged.'" - EJ Colen