The CSU Poetry Center is excited to announce the results of our 2017 book competitions. The following three books were selected from nearly 1,200 manuscripts and will be published in spring 2018. Thank you to everyone who sent us work & congratulations to the writers below.

Winner of the First Book Poetry Competition
Judge: Suzanne Buffam
Anna Maria Hong: The Glass Age

Anna Maria Hong is the Visiting Creative Writer at Ursinus College, where she teaches poetry, fiction, and hybrid-genre writing. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has published fiction and poetry in The Nation, Poetry, Ecotone, POOL, Southwest Review, Fence, Best New Poets, The Best American Poetry, and Verse Daily, among other journals and anthologies. Her poetry chapbook Hello, virtuoso! was published by the Belladonna* Collaborative and her novella, H & G, won the inaugural Clarissa Dalloway Prize from the A Room of Her Own Foundation and will be published by Sidebrow Books in early 2018.

First Book Honorable Mentions: Megin Jimenez’s Lone Stories; Melissa Barrett’s Moon on Roam.

First Book Finalists: Bryan Beck’s Countryman; Emily Brandt’s ManWorld; Ashley Chambers’s The Exquisite Buoyancies: A Sonography; Ansley Clark’s Bloodline; Samuel Corfman’s Luxury, Blue Lace; Scott Cunningham’s Ya Te Veo; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Pamela Hart’s Mothers over Nangarha; Amelia Klein’s Brilliant Dust; Davy Knittle’s get on like houses; Christine Larusso’s Mar; Rebecca Liu’s Mutter Tongue; Anna Mebel’s The Princess of Animals Invents Loneliness; Soham Patel’s ever really hear it; Nicholas Regiacorte’s American Massif; Robert Yerachmiel Snyderman’s Deform; Bronwen Tate’s Probable Garden; Candice Wuehle’s FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed.

First Book Semi-Finalists: Robyn Anspach’s Samson Speaks of Darkness; Micah Bateman’s Civil Servants; Timothy DeMay’s Avenue; Jonathan Dubow’s The Booth; Katherine Factor’s A Sybil Society; Judith Huang’s You, Riverine; Kimberly Kruge’s In-Migration; Megan Leonard’s What Queen What Binary Star; Paige Lewis’s No More; Jessica Marsh’s The Long Modify; Kelly Nelson’s The Possibility of My Absence; Michael Peterson’s Repeater; Cherry Pickman’s Islanders; Lacy Schutz’s Meathead in America; Bret Shepard’s Living As Magnets; Dennis James Sweeney’s In the Antarctic Circle; Grey Vild’s Ain’t Never; Sara Wainscott’s Insecurity System.

Winner of the Open Book Poetry Competition
Judges: Rebecca Gayle Howell, Lo Kwa Mei-en, & Lee Upton
Nicholas Gulig’s Orient

Nicholas Gulig is a Thai-American poet from Wisconsin. The author of North of Order (YesYes Books) and Book of Lake (Cutbank), he currently lives in Fort Atkinson, WI and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

Open Book Finalists: Samuel Ace’s Our Weather Our Sea; Sarah Boyer’s Righteous, Chrillis, My Mimi, & The Owl; Caroline Cabrera’s (Lack begins as a tiny rumble); Kristen Case’s Principles of Economics; Lorene Delany-Ullman’s Souvenir; Brandi George’s Faun; M.C. Hyland’s The End; Krystal Languell’s Quite Apart; Michelle Lin’s The Year of the Horse is Dead; Kristi Maxwell’s Bright and Hurtless; Alexis Pope’s That Which Comes After; Michael Robins’s With Love, Etc.; Kent Shaw’s Too Numerous; S.A. Stepanek’s somebody, maybe: a love poem; Terese Svoboda’s 40 Days/Nights; Gale Thompson’s Expeditions to the Polar Seas; Daneen Wardrop’s Catch My + Slips So Easy.

Open Book Semi-Finalists: Geoff Bouvier’s Potential Soldier; Lisa Fay Coutley’s Tether; Dot Devota’s By Abundant Delinquencies; Michael Tod Edgerton’s Yet Sensate Light; Stevie Edwards’s Lush; Laura Eve Engel’s I Write To You From the Sea; Henry Israeli’s Notes Toward a Revolution; Jason Koo’s More Than Mere Light; Dora Maelch’s Stet; Beth Marzoni’s There Was During a Sudden; Alexis Orgera’s Monster, Fall; Meghan Privitello’s One God at a Time; Alicia Rabins’s Fruit Geode; Mara Adamitz Scrupe’s & Bless The Survivors; Purvi Shah’s Miracle Marks; Jon Thompson’s Notebook of Last Things; Andrew Wessels’s The Sunshiny Field.

Winner of the Essay Collection Competition
Judge: Renee Gladman
Shaelyn Smith: The Leftovers

Shaelyn Smith grew up in northern Michigan, and received an M.F.A. in nonfiction from the University of Alabama. She now lives in Auburn, AL. Her work can be found in Essay Daily, storySouth, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Forklift, OH.

Essay Collection Finalists: Jennifer Militello’s Knock Wood; Addie Tsai’s and in its place--: An Ode to Frankenstein; Laurie Blauner’s I Was One of My Memories; Diana Arterian’s Arrangement of Parts; Kisha Schlegel’s Fear Icons; Joshua Bernstein’s In Josaphat’s Valley; Toni Mirosevich’s Spell Heaven; Beth Peterson’s Theory of World Ice; Sarah Minor’s At Home With River Animals; Sejal Shah’s Things People Say.

Essay Collection Semi-Finalists: Julie Marie Wade’s The Hourglass; Charles Green’s Ways of Being Afraid; Noah Eli Gordon’s Dysgraphia; Krista Eastman’s The Painted Forest; Frank Light’s Far and Away; Michael Levan’s Gravidarum; Matthew Schultz’s Other Places; Jill Darling’s The Collateral Media Project; Brenda Iijima’s End Empire, Apparition On; Rachel Peckham’s The Aviatrix.