The winners of the 2015 TYLER RIGG AWARD for outstanding Disability Studies Scholarship in Literature and Literary Analysis published in DSQ in 2014 (vol 34) are Sarah Juliet Lauro and Lindsay Waggoner Riordan for their article "Into the White: Larry Eigner’s Meta-physical Poetics.” The Tyler Rigg Award facilitates, promotes, and encourages ongoing scholarly exploration of disability issues, with emphasis on the examination of representations of disability as they are engaged through the study of literature.

Working collaboratively and interdisciplinarily, Sarah Juliet Lauro and Lindsay Waggoner Riordan combined their expertise in the disciplines of literature and art history, reading both the words on the page and the page as picture, in a manner that engages specifically with phenomenological philosophy, to explicate how these poems work on the body of the reader.

The judges wrote about the winning essay:

• This article is much deserving of the Tyler Rigg prize in that it breaks new ground in the reading of Larry Eigner's poetry. By expanding the critical framework beyond a disability theory-informed one to one that considers phenomenology, abstraction, and color theory, the article paradoxically reveals the profound connections between Eigner's subjective position as a disabled poet, his simultaneous commitment to visual abstraction (hence away from the personal "body"), and the very intimate role of the body or bodies in writing and reading (experiencing) poetry.
• This essay’s interdisciplinary approach to the poetry of Larry Eigner delivers a sophisticated understanding of his work in the context of both Black Mountain aesthetics and the poet’s cerebral palsy. It offers suggestive and original ways of thinking about the page’s blank space and the centrality of the body to understanding it.

The winners will receive a $500 award & a plaque at the business meeting of the 2015 SDS conference in Atlanta.