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2016 Book Contest Results

The CSU Poetry Center is thrilled to announce the results of our 2016 book competitions. The following three books were selected from nearly 1,000 manuscripts and will be published in spring 2017. Thank you to everyone who sent us work & congratulations to the winners and finalists below.

Winner of the First Book Poetry Competition
Judge: Daniel Borzutzky
Sheila McMullin’s daughterrariums

Sheila McMullin, poet and intersectional feminist, is Managing Editor at VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and serves on the Count Committee for the VIDA Count Intersectional Survey. A community-based workshop leader, she facilitates creative writing workshops for all ages as well as college prep sessions for high schoolers. She volunteers at her local animal rescue and holds an M.F.A. from George Mason University. Find more about her writing, editing, and awards online at www.moonspitpoetry.com and follow her on Twitter @SheAPoem
 

First Book Honorable Mentions: Monique-Adelle Callahan’s Exit Through the Body’s Prayer; Clara Changxin Fang’s Night Crossing over the Pacific.

First Book Finalists: Kristin George Bagdanov’s Fossils in the Making; Melissa Barrett’s Moon on Roam; Bryan Beck’s Countryman; E.C. Belli’s A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep; Jaime Brunton’s Reclaimed; Bill Carty’s Huge Cloudy; Mario Chard’s Land of Fire; Hilary Dobel’s Hot Cognition; Cassie Donish’s The Leaf Mask; Laura Eve Engel’s I Write to You From the Sea; Jameson Fitzpatrick’s Balcony Scene; Kelly Forsythe’s Perennial; Binswanger Friedman’s The Four Color Problem; Sam Gilpin’s Spawl; Monica Gomery’s here is the night and the night on the road; Christine Gosnay’s Lossless; Anna Maria Hong’s The Glass Age; R.E. Katz’s Dark Quencher; Keith Kopka’s Count Four; Emily Liebowitz’s National Park; Grace Shuyi Liew’s Careen; James Longley’s What Cheer Heptagon; Marco Maisto’s Traces of a Fifth Column; Sara Marshall’s To Be New for the Empire; Matt McBride’s Polis; Kelly Nelson’s Crossing Thief River; Lance Newman’s The Acid Craft of Numbers; Elsbeth Pancrazi’s Bodyswap; Ann Pelletier’s Letter That Never; Nina Puro’s Each Tree Could Hold a Gallows or a House; Chris Robinson’s Air Become Sinewed; Kenyatta Rogers’s Unf***withable; Zohra Saed’s The Secret Lives of Misspelled Cities; Max Schleicher’s Exhausted by the Rest; Kirsty Singer’s Tertullian’s Daughter; Molly Spencer’s Relic and the Plum; Adam Strauss’ Braided Sand Country; Kelly Sullivan’s Sleep Music; Billie Tadros’ Was Body; Carleen Tibbets’ dossier for the postverbal/; Lisa Wells’ Prisoner’s Cinema; Jared White’s The Trolls; Candice Wuehle’s FIDELITORIA: fixed or fluxed.

Winner of the Open Book Poetry Competition
Judges: Emily Kendal Frey, Siwar Masannat, & Jon Woodward
Jane Lewty’s In One Form to Find Another

Jane Lewty is the author of Bravura Cool (1913 Press, 2013), and the co-editor of two essay collections: Broadcasting Modernism (University of Florida Press, 2009) and Pornotopias: Image, Desire, Apcalypse (Litteraria Pragensia, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Harvard Review, Dusie, Lana Turner, Bone Bouquet and elsewhere. She has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently lives in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Open Book Honorable Mentions: Jackie Clark’s Everything Is Always Wonderful If It Is Almost Over; Gina Kelcher’s A Great Hair Day on the River.

Open Book Finalists: Carrie Bennett’s Ghost Plants and Other Animals; Carmen Gillespie’s The Ghosts of Monticello: A Recitative; Arpine Konyalian Grenier’s Yeva Girk; Sarah Heady’s Comfort; Ann Huang’s Saffron Splash; Megan Levad’s You Are Where You Live; Beth Marzoni’s There Was During a Sudden; Tyler Mills’ Salt Mask; Nathaniel Perry’s Long Rules; Beth Roberts’ Evolvers; Heidi Staples’ A**AA*A*A; S.A. Stepanek’s Somebody, Maybe; Gale Thompson’s Expeditions to the Polar Seas; M. A. Vizsolyi’s The Common Index of Poetic Lines; Joshua Young’s Sleep Ambulance.

Open Book Semi-Finalists: John Bradley’s Infinite Past: The Life & Lice of Miguel Carablanca; Alejandro Escude’s What the Atheists Speak Of; Tyler Gobble’s Hallelujah Jars; Christopher Kondrich’s Valuing; Jason Koo’s More Than Mere Light; Teresa Miller’s California Building; Jenn Marie Nunes’ Air/Or; Stan Mir’s Three Patterns; Emily Rosko’s Weather Inventions; Alexis Pope’s That Which Comes After; Liza Porter’s Rape Register; Sarah Smith’s Negative Cape; Cedric Tillman’s in my feelins; David Weiss’ Per Diem; Kathleen Winter’ Tonic.

Winner of the Essay Collection Competition
Judge: Chris Kraus
James Allen Hall’s I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well

James Allen Hall is the author of the poetry collection, Now You're the Enemy (University of Arkansas Press, 2008) and has won awards from the Lambda Literary Foundation, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His essays have appeared in Story Quarterly, Bellingham Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Redivider, and Bennington Review. A 2011 NEA Fellow in Poetry, he teaches creative writing and literature at Washington College on the eastern shore of Maryland.

Essay Collection Finalists: Kate Colby’s The Itch; Krista Eastman’s The Painted Forest; Elizabeth McConaghy’s Migrations; Kathryn Nuernberger’s Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past; Dustin Parsons’s Dispatches From the 51st State; Kisha Schlegel’s Fear Icons; Sejal Shah’s How To Make Your Mother Cry; Julie Marie Wade’s The State of Our Union: A Collage; Nicole Walker’s Microcosm.

Essay Collection Semi-Finalists: Diana Arterian’s Arrangement of Parts; Jehanne Dubrow’s Throughsmoke; Christine Hume’s The Saturation Project; Andy Fitch’s Garageland; Wes Jamison’s Carrion; Kat Moore’s In the Non-Light; Mariko Nagai’s Imaginary Death: A Family Memoir; Mwatabu Okantah’s The View from the Stono; Shaelyn Smith’s The Leftovers; Grace Talusan’s The Body Papers.

CSU Poetry Center Winter Round Up:

Happy winter solstice from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center! We’ve put together an end-of-year list of interviews, reviews, things-to-look-forward-to, and other Rust Belt hijinks.

2015 Catalog News:

We’re hearing stellar reports from critics and readers about the 2015 spring catalog. Broc Rossell’s Festival was reviewed at The Iowa Review, New Orleans Review, and dubbed “scrap-wire perfectivity” by C.D. Wright; Siwar Masannat was interviewed at the Woodland Pattern blog and her book 50 Water Dreams appeared on Ching-In Chen’s list of notable 2015 books at The Volta. Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles was reviewed at NewPages, American Microreviews, The Literary Review, and Publisher’s Weekly.
 
I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky, translated from the Russian by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, appeared on the SPD bestsellers list this fall (along with titles by Siwar Masannat and Lee Upton) and is on the longlist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Phil Metres discusses translation at The Sound of Applause.
 
Kristina Marie Darling at Tupelo Quarterly says “Three recent [CSU Poetry Center] titles in particular place diverse and often very different artistic traditions in dialogue with one another, envisioning poetry as a rhetorical space where disparate cultures, mediums, and historical milieu can exist side by side. Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles, Broc Rossell’s Festival, and Arseny Tarkovksy’s I Burned at the Feast, newly translated by Philip Metres and Dimitri Psurtsev, each initiate provocative dialogues between literary and artistic communities in a way that is altogether refreshing.”

Forthcoming Books:

Leora Fridman, Lo Kwa Mei-en, and Martin Rock, winners of our 2015 poetry book competitions, answer questions about their forthcoming titles in this digital chapbook just published by the good folks at Essay Press. While you’re at it, check out the companion interview at The Conversant in which Lily Hoang, winner of our fist-ever essay collection competition, discusses her forthcoming book of nonfiction.  
 
Leora Fridman’s My Fault, Lo Kwa Mei-en’s The Bees Make Money in the Lion, Martin Rock’s Residuum, and Lily Hoang’s A Bestiary will be published in April 2016; drop us a note if you’re interested in review copies or more information.

Book Competitions:

Our 2016 book competitions will open for submission on January 1st, 2016. The judges this year will be First Book Poetry: Daniel Borzutzky; Open Book Poetry: Emily Kendal Frey, Siwar Masannat, & Jon Woodward; and Essay Collection: Chris Kraus. We can’t wait to start reading your work!
 
For more thinking on our Essay Collection Competition check out last year’s post at Essay Daily.

Other Updates: 

Congrats to Wendy Xu, whose second book, Phrasis, will be published by Fence Books in 2017. Check out new titles by Nin Andrews, Phil Metres, Sandra Simonds, and Shane McCrae. S.E. Smith’s I Live in a Hut and Chloe Honum’s The Tulip-Flame were recently reviewed in Galatea Resurrects. Chloe Honum won the 2014 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award for Poetry. Rebecca Gayle Howell is interviewed at The Adroit Journal and Render/An Apocalypse is reviewed in the Denver Quarterly. Shane McCrae published 30 stunning paragraphs of memoir at Essay Press. Lizzie Harris’ Stop Wanting is reviewed in Pleiades.
 
The Lighthouse Reading Series, named the best new reading series by Cleveland Scene, will be back in action next semester with this lovely line up; we’ll be back at the CSU Galleries on Friday, February 12th with Morgan Parker and Emily Pettit.
 
And, last but not least, thanks to our NEOMFA students and CSU volunteers who help keep this magnificent literary machine in motion.

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