Award-Winning Poetry and Prose 2021
Winter 2021-2022: Poetry
THE KINDREDS
by Meredith Stricker
Winner of the 2020 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize
Postmark Deadline: December 31
This prestigious award for a full-length manuscript gives a $3,000 cash prize, publication, and a week-long residency at MASS MoCA, a modern art museum in North Adams, MA, valued at $1,500. Stricker's re-wilding won the 2020 contest. This philosophical poem-sequence suggests that humans' family members include animals, plants, and so-called inanimate natural features such as rocks and rivers. "if a corporation is a person does it wake up/in dread like a person sometimes does", she queries half in jest, concluding that "if trees/have no soul/then neither/do we".
HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (2012)
by KB
Winner of the 2021 Saguaro Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by December 31
This poetry chapbook prize from Kallisto Gaia Press gives $1,200 and publication. In the title poem of their winning collection, the speaker re-creates the memory of a playground fight with a frenemy who called them a homophobic slur, holding the painful sensations alongside a broader view of the oppressions that stressed both participants: "I saw her/biting into my arm, wishing that justice would come spilling out."
MOZART IN THE XXI CENTURY
by Leonora Simonovis
Winner of the 2021 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Postmark Deadline: January 14
This long-running award from Colorado State University gives $2,500 and publication for a full-length collection. Simonovis' debut collection Study of the Raft won the most recent contest. This poem recounts the tragic heroism of a young Venezuelan man who was tortured by the Maduro regime for playing his violin at a protest.
from HOSPITAL PAMPHLET
by Paul Hlava Ceballos
Winner of the 2021 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received between January 1-February 28
This competitive award for a full-length poetry manuscript is sponsored by AWP and includes $5,500 and publication by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Ceballos won the most recent contest with his collection banana [ ], an expansion of his chapbook about the brutal exploitation of South American workers and land by the Del Monte fruit company. In this visionary selection from his long poem "Hospital Pamphlet", an organ transplant technician muses about the lives that exist inside other lives, as past and future are superimposed on each other.
Summer 2021: Poetry
BOX OF SOUND W/ SOME FUNK IN IT
by Dennis Hinrichsen
Winner of the 2020 Off the Grid Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by August 31
This $1,000 award from Grid Books accepts full-length poetry manuscripts by authors aged 60+. Hinrichsen's collection This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else to Go was the most recent winner. This flowing poem pays tribute to "hitman of funk" James Brown with stream-of-consciousness syncopation and smoothness.
THANKS A LOT, SHAKESPEARE, FOR THE STARLING
by Jonathan Greenhause
Winner of the 2020 Fischer Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by August 31
The Telluride Institute gives prizes up to $1,000, online publication, and a public reading (online this year) for a single poem. Previously published work is eligible. Greenhause's wry poem looks at what happens when our symbolic projections onto nature collide with the complex reality of the ecosystem.
GIRL'S GUIDE TO LEAVING and other poems
by Laura Villareal
Winner of the 2020 Coniston Prize
Entries must be received by September 1
Radar Poetry gives $2,000 and publication for a cohesive group of 3-5 poems by a woman writer (trans-inclusive). In this poem, Villareal invokes a ghostly Mexican legend to express the thrill and taboo of being "the first girl in your family/to never stop moving". Subsequent poems follow the speaker's struggle with being queer and brown in Texas, and the ways that dangerous relationships can feel like home.
NIGHT OF THE LIVING and TAXONOMY
by Susan Leslie Moore
Winner of the 2019 Juniper Prize for Poetry
Entries must be received by September 30
This long-running award series from the University of Massachusetts Press gives two prizes of $1,000 and publication, one for a debut collection and the other for a subsequent collection. Moore's book That Place Where You Opened Your Hands won the 2019 debut prize. In these pensive poems, she examines the schema we impose on our surroundings, sometimes whimsical, other times limiting: "A horse behind a fence is progress, but only if you're not the horse."
Spring 2021: Fiction and Nonfiction
THE RAVAGES OF AN UNLOVED LIFE
by Tryphena L. Yeboah
Third Prize Winner of Narrative Magazine's 2020 Spring Story Contest
Next deadline: March 31
This quarterly award from Narrative, a well-regarded online journal, gives prizes up to $2,500 for unpublished short fiction and creative nonfiction. The Winter 2021 contest is open through March 31. In this searing and poetic personal essay, a young Ghanaian woman studying in America confronts her lifelong body dysmorphic disorder when she rents an apartment full of mirrors.
THE CURE
by Candy Lavender
Winner of the 2020 Gemini Magazine Short Story Contest
Entries must be received by March 31
This long-running award from online poetry and prose journal Gemini Magazine gives prizes up to $1,000 for short stories, 6,000 words maximum. Lavender's timely and disturbing tale is narrated by a CDC researcher visiting a tropical island that has remained mysteriously untouched by a global pandemic.
MERCURY IS IN MAYONNAISE
by Suzanne Samples
Winner of the 2020 Prime Number Magazine Award for Short Fiction
Entries must be received by March 31
Press 53's literary journal gives $1,000 apiece and publication for a poem and a short story. In this darkly comic story, a brain cancer survivor's problems are compounded by a chaotic ex-girlfriend.
PRESERVATION
by Gregory Jeffers
Winner of the Winter 2019 Sixfold Short Story Award
Entries must be received by April 23
Online literary journal Sixfold offers several $1,000 prizes a year for fiction and poetry, with the winners voted on by the writers who enter. This wry, gritty story follows a resourceful single mother who runs an unusual business out of her trailer-park home.
