Winners
Poetry
2024 WINNERS - POETRY
See below for the list of 2024 winners in the POETRY category, for books with a copyright date of 2023.
Morning Leaves: Reflections on Loss, Grief and Connection
2024 Gold Winner
Author: Laing F. Rikkers
Publisher: The Collective Book Studio
ISBN: 9781685555955
In the wake of the untimely death of the author's younger sister and isolated by the pandemic, Rikkers produced Morning Leaves, a book of vulnerable, evocative, and ultimately hopeful poems. She introduces her story and explains how counseling, the artistic process, and nature helped her through the healing process.
Indigo Hours: Healing Haiku
2024 Silver Winner
Author: Nancy Stone
Publisher: Rootstock Publishing
ISBN: 9781578691425
Indigo Hours is a lyrical, profound, and playful book of haiku poems with original scratchboard drawings from an artist thrust into the role of care partner after her husband's diagnosis of Alzheimer's. Her poems and art offer glimmers of gratitude, courage, and resilience for moving forward with an open heart during challenging times.
The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra
2024 Silver Winner
Authors: Cecilia Vicuña, Rosa Alcalá, Etel Adnan, Sarah Riggs, Ananda Devi, Kazim Ali, Polina Barskova, Valzhyna Mort, Yu Xiuhua, Amanda Lee Koe, Kit Warren (artist); editors: Kythe Maryam Heller, Carolina Gómez-Montoya
Publisher: Stenen Press
ISBN: 9781735952321
Translation as friendship. Translation in a fractured world. The Soul Conveys Itself in Shadow / El alma se mueve en la sombra offers dazzling imagery, original poetry, mutual translations, and collaborative essays. Swimming across borders, histories, and echoes, this groundbreaking anthology features creative partnerships that celebrate translation as equitable, intimate, and necessary.
2023 WINNERS - POETRY
See below for the list of 2023 winners in the POETRY category, for books with a copyright date of 2022.
Field Notes
2023 Gold Winner
Author: Margaret Rogal
Publisher: North Dakota State University Press
ISBN: 9781946163493
In 1909, twenty-two-year-old Robert Silliman Judd boarded a train from Connecticut to where his uncle Elmer farmed in North Dakota. Robert roamed the prairie with Elmer, observing and collecting birds. Decades later, Robert’s granddaughter Margaret Rogal discovered his letters, summaries, and notebooks filled with detailed records and responded with poetry.
At the Corner of Fantasy and Main: Disneyland, Midlife and Churros
2023 Silver Winner
Author: Matt Mason
Publisher: The Old Mill Press
ISBN: 9781735769134
At The Corner of Fantasy and Main is about how our heart is sometimes more reliable than our memory and how places that are touchstones in our lives stay with us in ways that don’t always seem to make sense. And, well, it’s about Disneyland, midlife, and churros.
Urbanshee
2023 Silver Winner
Author: Siaara Freeman
Publisher: Button Poetry
ISBN: 9781638340256
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Urbanshee is Siaara Freeman’s retelling of fairy tales and mythological stories through a modern and urban lens. This collection discusses the weight of being Black in America, Freeman’s relationships to lovers and family, and how the physical place you grew up can become part of your identity.
2022 WINNERS - POETRY
See below for the list of 2022 winners in the POETRY category, for books with a copyright date of 2021.
Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone
2022 Gold Winner
Author: Shanee Stepakoff
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9781684483105
Derived from transcripts of public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone, this remarkable poetry collection delicately extracts heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience.
I Was a Bell
2022 Silver Winner
Author: M. Soledad Caballero
Publisher: Red Hen Press
ISBN: 9781597094900
In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present.
The Kontum Madonna
2022 Silver Winner
Author: J. Vincent Hansen
Publisher: North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.
ISBN: 9781682011218
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
2021 WINNERS - POETRY
See below for the list of 2021 winners in the POETRY category, for books with a copyright date of 2020. Click here to watch the Gold and Silver winner speeches.
His Feathers Were Chains
2021 Gold Winner
Author: Denise K. Lajimodiere
Publisher: North Dakota State University Press
ISBN: 9781946163226
Lajimodiere’s newest collection of poetry takes its title from a statue the author observed - an Indian on a horse - fashioned from welded-together farm implements. The premise of the collection is overt criticism of settler society, but the poetry is subtle, approachable, and grounded in Ojibwe knowledge and customs.
Did You Sing Your Song?: Poems
2021 Silver Winner
Author: Mary C. Earle
Publisher: New Beginnings, an imprint of Material Media
ISBN: 9781947460072
The poems in this volume reflect a lifetime of listening for what the Irish call "the music of what happens." Mary Earle was inspired by the Divine Song that sings in everything. Her poems invite the reader to listen along and awaken to the rhythms of life.
Shelter
2021 Silver Winner
Author: Margaret Hasse, art by Sharon DeMark
Publisher: Nodin Press
ISBN: 9781947237315
In a time of the pandemic, we may find new shades of meaning in the term "shelter." Here poet Margaret Hasse and artist Sharon DeMark pair words and images to depict a variety of shelters including structures (a hut, a bus stop), experiences (hugging, reading), and private retreats.
2020 WINNERS - POETRY
See below for the list of 2020 winners in the POETRY category, for books with a copyright date of 2019.
Homespun Mercies
2020 Gold Winner
Author: DJ Hill
Publisher: Light of the Moon
ISBN: 9781732790940
Told through poetry and original artwork, Homespun Mercies is a journey of the soul, with each page bringing readers to a deeper realization of self.
Human-Powered Poetry from the Appalachian Trail: A Thru-hiker's Perspective
2020 Silver Winner
Author: Daniel "Screech" Zube
Publisher: Peter E. Randall Publisher
ISBN: 9781937721770
Hikers will enjoy these short poems and color photographs captured at specific mile markers along the Appalachian Trail. Small enough to pack!
Save Our Ship
2020 Silver Winner
Author: Barbara Ungar
Publisher: The Ashland Poetry Press
ISBN: 9780912592749
In this alphabet book of feminist and ecological resistance, #MeToo meets Global Weirding, and women do not mind their tongues, or their Ps and Qs.
the skin of dreams: new and collected poems 1995-2018
2020 Silver Winner
Author: Quraysh Ali Lansana
Publisher: The Calliope Group
ISBN: 9781733647403
the skin of dreams maps small-town Oklahoma to southside Chicago. Exploring complicated terrains of Blackness, history, and home, these poems cry, sing, scream, and see.
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