Academy of American Poets Prize
Judge: Ben Estes
Winner: Suzanne Bagia
"Hesitant, but never timid. Expecting. Cool reminders that ghosts are not always lossed loved ones, we are haunted by everything we don't let go of."
Honorable Mention: Sammy Lê
"Beautiful lines that go on and on without ever really breaking. Stretching and winding around the poem like a vine winding itself around a fence post. Reading them is pure joy."
Best New Poets Anthology
Judge: Aaron Kunin
Nominee: Lena Rubin
"[Rubin] has a remarkable consistency of style. Each line has a precise shape, as if poured into a mold, but the speaker is not easily contained. One of the poems discovers a previously overlooked possibility in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense. Heady, brainy, bookish. And with guts."
Nominee: Noelle Mrugalla-Paraan
"[Mrugalla-Paraan] uses the dash as a sign that something is falling apart or coming together. Syntax is suspended but not static: the question mark that should follow 'What is the question beauty asks' finally appears in the last line. I like to see a lyricism so pure."
Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction
Judge: Christa Parravani
Winner: Bec Bell-Gurwitz
"'The Looking Glass Dildos' is a risky, longing, wise, and unforgettable story. It’s told from the distance of years, by one member of a young couple who’d attended a sex workshop with her then girlfriend; the famous and highly questionable sex educator who’d invited them, had admired and shamed the narrator. Through a momentous and uncomfortable group sex workshop, where a hand-crafted glass dildo is stolen, this story voices the pain of a young woman coming of age as a writer in academia. Here, in these pages, the writer grapples with privacy, desire, insecurity, hiding, sexual identity, and the painful and confusing ways in which young women are easily exploited by older, powerful teachers."
Honorable Mention: Larry Flynn
"And how do we tell our children the story and truth about the world we’ve given them? A world of war, environmental collapse, and complete social breakdown is where they live, even now, under the safety of our roofs. The task of telling feels impossible. And yet, in "Kaleidoscopes for Daniel", a father attempts it for his child. Written in lush yet simple prose, this novel uses the poetry of lists, firmly rooted scene, and storytelling as its guide. This novel promises to be both a stunning indictment and hopeful lesson; through the hard story of how we've failed one another and our planet, we might teach the next generation how to do better."
Daniel and Merry Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry
Judge: Julian Talamantez Brolaski
Winner: Riley Jones
"The poet ‘[doesn’t] care about narration’ because, in this world, melody is primary. These poems demonstrate a sensitivity to sound as fine as the filaments lining the inner ear, singing ‘scales in an imperceptible register,’ coalescing inscrutable logics into a resonant music. The poems don’t inundate us with their poeticalness, but reveal bit by bit the wondrous manifold world."
Honorable Mention: Haley Harris
"This poet constructs a pocket cosmos, a choreographed smokescreen where the ‘so-called decorative arts’ are ‘the main event.’ The poem stuffs its shirt with napkins to 'appear brawny,’ forging a ‘sobriety of [its] own making’ amidst the bewildering onslaught of late-capital psychedelia. Tunes in to the ‘low hum of old radio interference’ rather than seeking a clear channel, which makes the grass ‘impossibly green,’ reinscribing the mirror of nature to construct an homage to its power: ‘The sea only had to knock my air out once / For me to be its patron forever.’"
Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Fiction
Judge: Bruna Dantas Lobato
Winner: Katia Bakhtiyarova
"A poetic, haunting, layered, and moving novel excerpt. Every single line here is lovely and full of tension, somehow steeped in anticipatory grief for all that is about to come. I'll be thinking about Mama and Papa for a long time."
Honorable Mention: Josh Byron-Vigil
"A clever, original, and expertly crafted take on immigration and promised homelands, both real and imagined. I'm left seeing the language around the idea of home anew. And the final line is pitch perfect."
Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry
Judge: Katie Naughton
Winner: Allie McKean
"I admire the way these poems open ideas through the experience of the material world 'reversible / and mandatory / an abject line that can come on and off'; 'a broken up dingy sunk somewhere/ here in rest /rotting or reshaping like a verb as it changes tense /past to present /the old thing always drags towards its original form.' These poems offer an interesting interrogation of how we place ourselves in the order of things//in the order as things."
Honorable Mention: Sammy Lê
"I admire semi-surreal post-colonial narrative built lightly between these poems. The mythic and its everyday actions become a way to forge impossible and necessary connection across time and place: 'how a city can be exhausted, and yet, with magic or sex / or literature or gold or profane rhythms, raise the dead—/ see, this is not a story.'"
Harvey Swados Fiction Prize
Judge: Becky Mandelbaum
Winner: Nathan Zachar
"I had a feeling this submission was the winner when it made me laugh out loud. I knew for sure it was the winner when I couldn’t stop thinking about it days later. Like all the best novel openings, 'Spiders and Saints' creeps up on you. What might otherwise be a straightforward story of a young man inheriting his grandmother’s house quickly transforms into a layered account of obsession, mental illness, and guilt. As the chapters unfold, we begin to suspect that both the house and our narrator, Danny, are holding secrets—some of which may be supernatural. The prose here, like the story itself, is at once forthright and furtive, holding back just when the emotion is most urgent."
Honorable Mention: Sara Hetherington
"I’m always in awe when a story’s tension is derived not from conflict but from the lack of it. That’s the crux in 'Snow Day,' an aptly named story where our narrator’s emotional landscape feels both chillingly flat and strangely compelling. As a campus story it also succeeds in portraying the self-consciousness of college, when you’re constantly comparing yourself to your peers, trying to determine if you’re doing it right or falling behind in some crucial, unidentifiable way. This is a story about someone who knows something essential is missing and yet can’t quite articulate what, while at the same time recognizing that the ineffable thing surrounds her—again, like snow—at once beautiful, ubiquitous, and ungraspable."
James W. Foley Memorial Prize
Judge: Shauna Seliy
Winner: Shashank Rao
"There are so many haunting, vivid images in 'Stray Dogs'. I was captivated from the opening lines and read straight through to the end. I'm impressed with how the author handles time in the story, as well as the delicate treatment of themes of presence and absence. An absorbing coming-of-age story."
Jane Lunin Perel Poets Fund
Judge: Cole Swensen
Winner: Joanie Cappetta
"Here, the unexpected occurs so frequently that you begin to expect it—without knowing what you’re expecting—so that the delight of surprise, the sort that gives off intellectual sparks, is constant, and is contrasted with a strong sense of theme, resulting in an outward propulsion of surprise counterbalanced by intimations of content that hold us tightly in. An unusual fluidity of image gives the whole uncommon speed."
Honorable Mention: Megan Friedman
"These poems are full of evocations that hint toward metaphor while remaining solidly concrete, creating a great sweep that spans and fuses the figurative and literal worlds. Temporality is finely controlled, whether it’s through short, terse lines that move with a staccato swiftness, putting maximum pressure on the line-break, or longer ones that unfurl with ample room for imaginative meditation. The variety of style and tone keep the reader engaged and alert."
Skolfield Goeckel Award
Judge: Katherine Indermaur
Winner: Jennifer Valdies
"These poems are unabashed about their beauty and are quietly expert in their craft. Conviction blossoms into imagery's spell. The reader is cared for here."
Honorable Mention: Hunter Larson
"Each of these poems is scaffolded by voice, by the inner life. From that scaffolding a refreshing playfulness takes form."
Congratulations to all!