Haesong Kwon’s The People’s Field Selected as Winner of the 2018 Cowles Poetry Prize
SOUTHEAST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS is pleased to announce that Haesong Kwon’s manuscript The People’s Field has been selected by our final judge, Jenny Yang Cropp, as the winner of the 2018 Cowles Poetry Prize. Kwon’s book will be published in fall 2019. A full list of finalists and semi-finalists is below.
With attention to the Japanese occupation, the Korean War and its aftermath, The People’s Field reflects on the sounds, ideas and histories of the Korean peninsula. Of her selection, Cropp writes, “Kwon’s manuscript contains a paradoxical experience of both movement and stillness, history and the eternal present. These poems, short and spare, carry the intensity of distillation but resist the epigrammatic as they show us a rich and complex landscape that asks for and earns reading after reading.”
Haesong Kwon is the author of the chapbook Many Have Fallen (Cutbank Books). His poems have appeared in New Orleans Review, Quarterly West, Mid-American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Yalobusha Review, Louisville Review, Redivider and others. He lives in Shiprock, New Mexico and teaches at Diné College.
The Cowles Poetry Book Prize takes place annually, with submissions closing on April 1 each year. Southeast Missouri State University Press, founded in 2001, serves both as a publisher and as a working laboratory for students interested in learning the art and skills of literary publishing.
Finalists
Inside Ball Lightning by Rainie Oet
Notes on Vanishing by Cammy Pedroja
Out of the Cosmos Factory by Tony Trigilio
Semi-finalists
Rare, Wondrous Things by Alyse Bensel
Thanksgiving Dinner in a Rich Zip Code by Stephanie Brown
Ten Thousand Volts by Richard Cecil
An Expectation of Broken Things by Reese Conner
The Dreams of Weapons by Melissa Ginsburg
Gadfly Apocrypha by Brad Johnson
A More Country by Claire McQuerry
Sharks vs. Selfies by Martin Ott
I Will Tell All Myself by Todd Osborne
Compass for Hands by Bret Shepard
Shorless by Enid Shomer
You Are Still Alive by William Stobb
Playing House on the Bones by Anna Sutton
The Inscrutable World by M. A. Vizsolyi
Guilt Ledger by Ross White
Local Talent by Jacob Wright
It was a pleasure reading everyone’s work!