FARMINGTON — Jeffrey Thomson, University of Maine at Farmington associate professor of creative writing, has recently been awarded the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance 2010 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.

Thomson received the award in recognition of his fourth collection of poems, “Birdwatching in Wartime,” in which he explores the way questions of beauty, grief and desire are filtered through landscapes and natural images.

Thomson is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, two limited-edition art books and the co-editor of an anthology of emerging poets. In recent years, Thomson has been honored with a Fellowship in the Literary Arts from the Maine Arts Commission in 2008, a Creative Artists Fellowship in Literature from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts in 2006 and a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2005.

He has also received fellowships from the Wesleyan Writers Conference, the Sewanee Writers Conference and Writers @ Work.

Thomson’s work has appeared in Quarterly West, Isotope, Indiana Review, Sycamore Review, Brilliant Corners, Gulf Coast and Willow Springs. He received his Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Missouri.