The Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry (no fee)
Deadline: February 15, 2025
Kansas poets with book-length works published in the past three years (2022–24) are eligible to win the $1,000 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry. The annual award, rotating between poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, is sponsored by the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at Washburn University in Topeka and the Friends of Mabee Library. Poets with a connection to the state of Kansas through birth, residence, education, employment, or some other significant circumstance are eligible. There is no fee to enter.
This year's judge will be 2022 HHKBA Poetry winner Michael Kleber-Diggs, author of Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions, 2021), which also received the Max Ritvo Prize and the Balcones Prize.
The 2024 Hefner Heitz Book Award in Literary Nonfiction went to Brian Daldorph for Words Is a Powerful Thing: Twenty Years of Teaching Creative Writing at Douglas County Jail. In 2023, Catherine Browder won the award in fiction for her story collection Resurrection City.
The Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection—sponsor of the competition—is an eclectic, inclusive set of materials dedicated to the study of Kansas literature through the state's folklore, history, geography, flora, fauna, and culture.
