After The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam wrote a column about Foetry.com noting that on the site, Jorie Graham “was chided for, among other things, awarding the 2000 [University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poets] prize to her then-partner, now husband, Peter Sacks,” Graham wrote a letter to the Globe denying the charge and stating that “I did not select Peter Sacks’s manuscript . . . I recused myself from considering it.” As a result, the Globe was forced to run a correction. But earlier this week (see Tuesday’s MobyLives news digest), a Chronicle of Higher Education report by Thomas Bartlett noted that “documents . . . do not seem to support [Graham’s] scenario.” Now, Foetry’s Alan Cordle has made public what seems to be the story’s smoking gun transcript: letters, mostly written in 1999, from the Sacks judging file. In them, Graham, in the words of series editor Bim Ramke, “enthusiastically concurs” with the selection of Sacks. Items of note in the file: a new cover letter from Ramke, written just last month, attempting to explain how, when he said that Graham “enthusiastically concurred,” she was simulateneously recused nonetheless; another letter in which Ramke announces Graham has made her recommendations (there were two winners that year, Sacks and Lee Upton) and “I concur with them enthusiastically”; in that same letter, Ramke’s noting that he believed Sack’s book “should be a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (a group I belong to, and will nominate the book personally)”; Ramke’s startling admission in two of the letters that the contest was in a sense fixed: although entry was supposed to be open to anyone willing to pay the entry fee, he had solicited Sacks’ entry and would have fought for it to win no matter what the guest judge decided — meaning money taken from other entrants was taken under false pretenses; and a dense, unsigned, full page of text by Graham praising Sacks’ writing—her apparent judge’s evaluation of the manuscript. (“He utters the word joy . . . Most importantly, it is he who vectors time again, pointing toward another flayed creature, Jesus, whose acceptance of such flaying results in a skin of such tensile strength—albeit quasi immaterial—that he invites us to put our hand into it and feel that splinter of joy called hope . . . .”) Ramke has since resigned as series editor. Foetry obtained the letters through a third party and this is their first publication.