We’re pleased to announce the winners of several creative writing awards and look forward to publication of these works in the fall of 2022!

Association of Writers & Writing Programs

Congratulations to Anne-Marie Oomen for winning the Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction with her work As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book.

Anne-Marie Oomen edited Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction, is author of The Lake Michigan Mermaid (coauthored with Linda Nemec Foster), Pulling Down the Barn, House of Fields (all Michigan Notable Books), American Map: Essays, Uncoded Woman (poetry), and Love, Sex and 4-H (Next Generation Indie Award for Memoir). She has written seven plays, including the award-winning Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern. She is a poetry and nonfiction instructor at Solstice MFA at Lasell University (Mass.) and Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She and her husband David Early live in their hand-made house near Traverse City, Michigan, where they have a “novel” garden and foster a dog named Chester the Jester. Visit her at www.anne-marieoomen.com

Oomen’s As Long as I Know You will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2022. Last year’s winner, Other Girls to Burn, by Caroline Crew, was published by UGA Press on October 1, 2021.

Review
“There is a brave intimacy in As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book. Such a thorough, deep remembrance casts its gaze not only on those who have passed but the devastation of loss itself. Laced into these exquisite sentences is a lesson for us all on how to honor a life.”—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

National Poetry Series

The National Poetry Series congratulates the five winners of the 2021 National Poetry Series Competition:

Symmetry of Fish by Su Cho
Chosen by Paige Lewis for Penguin Books

Harbinger by Shelley Puhak
Chosen by Nicole Sealey for Ecco

Extinction Theory by Kien Lam
Chosen by Kyle Dargan for the University of Georgia Press 

Ask the Brindled_Indigiqueer Poetry from Hawaiʻi by Noukahauoli Revilla
Chosen by Rick Barot for Milkweed Editions  

Relinquenda by Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Chosen by Reginald Betts for Beacon Press   

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of poetry books annually through participating publishers. More than 160 books have been awarded since the series’ inception. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation, Stephen Graham, the Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds, and the Poetry Foundation.

“This book of theories, songs, mantras, and more–threaded through with flourishes of compassion for a father finding himself and maybe pathos for a mother who served as tether post for a speaker dizzied by colonizing language and the god it claimed to represent–it impels us to think hard about the word made flesh, or our existential fear made music, or the cultural alienation that . . . doesn’t transmute into anything and persists as a foreign object lodged in the tongue. ‘Life is a series/ of extinctions’–excisions. Each time I read this collection, I think it pierced me for a different reason. In that way, all those edges, these lyrics are scalpels Kien Lam wields with an awareness that when one has something so sharp, they need not to press heavily to slice deep.” —Kyle Dargan

For more information, please contact Beth Dial, Coordinator, The National Poetry Series, 57 Mountain Avenue, Princeton, NJ 08540, or bethdial@nationalpoetryseries.org.

Kien Lam is a Kundiman Fellow and an Indiana University MFA alumni. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming from Poetry, the New Republic, The Nation, and elsewhere. He currently lives in Los Angeles, where he writes about professional video game players.