As our semester winds down around here, we’ll have limited hours on campus. We’ll still be shipping orders, but it might take a little bit longer through mid-August or so!
We’re excited to announce the winner of our 2022 Cowles Poetry Prize. We received a *ton* of fantastic submissions this year. In fact, this year we received more submissions than we ever have before. It was a pleasure to read and think about all of these manuscripts.
The winning manuscript was picked by our final judge, and previous prize winner, Rachel Hinton, from a set of manuscripts painstakingly selected by our initial readers. Here are the results:
Winner:
A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue by Christine Kwon
Finalists:
This Smile is Starting to Hurt by Dylan Loring
Lavish Cruelty by Katie Jean Shinkle
Keeping in the Dark by Noah Stetzer
Eveningful by Jennifer Whalen
Semi-finalists
Happy Everything by Caitlin Cowan
Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn
The Continuing Book by Robert Okaji
Inside the Golden Hunting Years by Delaney Olmo
A Grito Contest in the Afterlife by Vincent Rendoni
Night Swimming by Liz Robbins
Variable of Uncertain Effect by Matthew Schmidt
Steady, Girl by Leona Sevick
Family, Extended by Mark Smith-Soto
I’d Rather Be Lightning by Nancy Woo
We are pleased to announce the winner, along with the finalists and semi-finalists:
Winner:
The Last Innocent Year: Stories by Kerry Jones
Kerry Jones was raised in Catasauqua, Pennsylvania, attended Mansfield University and Temple University, and received her MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University, where she now teaches. Her fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Orchid, Night Train, The Rambler, Bryant Literary Review, Sycamore Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Seems, and most recently in SLAB.
Finalists:
Impossible Object: A Novel in Stories by Robyn Carter
All Hours by Bernard Grant
Contingent Contingencies by Leah McCormack
Forgottonia by Chad Simpson
Semi-Finalists:
Roan by Mathew Goldberg
The Kind of Music Not a Song by Tamar Jacobs
A Cabinet of Curiosity by Leanne Ogasawara
Dust Between Clouds: A Palestinian Story by Hadeel Salameh
How do you like these bad days? By Maggie Smith
How Do I Seem? By Joe Truscello
Whole by Derek Updegraff
Thank you all for submitting and trusting us with your work. This is never an easy decision, and there were so many wonderful manuscripts.
We’re thrilled to announce the winner and finalists for the 2021 Cowles Poetry Prize. Our dedicated readers and interns spent countless hours reading many (so many!) fantastic manuscripts. The competition was fierce, and we passed along twenty manuscripts to our final judge, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, who narrowed down the list to a top five, from which she selected this year’s winner. We are so incredibly grateful you all trust us with your vital, magnificent work. And of course, we’re already accepting submissions for the 2022 contest. Without further ado, then, our winner, shortlist, and longlist:
Winner: Gold Hill Family Audio by Corrie Lynn White
Corrie Lynn White’s poetry has appeared in Oxford American, New Ohio Review, Best New Poets, Mid American Review, and Mississippi Review, among other places. Originally from Gold Hill, North Carolina, she holds a BA from UNC Chapel Hill and an MFA from UNC Greensboro. She currently lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she works as a journalist and was named the 2021 Tennessee Arts Commission Fellow in Poetry. Gold Hill Family Audio will be published in fall, 2022!
Shortlist:
bad prayer by Katie Berta
BLACK METAMORPHOSIS by Shanta Lee Gander
Dear Daughter, by Ellen Kombiyil
Eveningful by Jennifer Whalen
Longlist:
Out of Nowhere: Poems by Susan Comninos
star vehicle (the year i moved to st. louis) by Charlotte Covey
Happy Everything by Caitlin Cowan
A Suit of Paper Feathers by Nate Duke
Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis
Whipsaw by Suzanne Frischkorn
Swan Hammer: An Instructor’s Guide to Mirrors by Maggie Graber
No Spare People by Erin Hoover
This Smile is Starting to Hurt by Dylan Loring
History Lesson by Todd Osborne
Steady, Girl by Leona Sevick
Black Don’t Crack by Valerie Smith
On Main Street by Alex Turissini
Notes on Silence and Noise by Suzanne Wise
pH of Au by Vanessa Couto Johnson
Once again, thank you all for trusting us with your work! It’s truly an honor.
"Kerry Jones’s work opens our eyes anew. The subtle interplay among her characters is in stark contrast to the action those characters experience. This is life as we live it, often odd, sometimes funny, but always dramatic." —Perry Glasser, author of American Mayhem
This collection features the five short plays that were Official Selections of the 2021 Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival – all written by
playwrights based in Missouri (the home state of both the festival and its Pulitzer Prize-winning namesake).
"These poems luxuriate on elegance in a way that feels entirely necessary, the way Garbo's eyes lit up the Great Depression or Julie London's voice puts you in the moods to open your flower. Kwon's casually gorgeous lines are the best thing since melted butter."—D.A. POWELL
The anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors series showcases writing from military veterans and their families from across the nation, including writing about WWI and WWII, Vietnam, the Gulf Conflict, Afghanistan, and Iraq.