The editors are pleased to announce that Poetry Judge Gillian Conoley chose Kim Garcia’s Poem “Early Marriage, 1982, Endless Rain” as the winner of this year’s Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry. Garcia will receive $1000 and publication in this year’s Dogwood. Finalists for this year’s prize in poetry were David Tucker, Veronica Patterson, Kosrof Chantikian, Atoosa Grey, Karen Harryman, Natalie Homer, K.T. Landon, Alysse McCanna, Nicole Melanson, Charles Neaves, Billy Reynolds, and Jaclyn Weber, each of whose work will also be featured in Dogwood 2018.
Of Garcia’s Poem, Conoley wrote she admired the work “for its care with sound and consonance and assonance that makes a tender music that is almost invisible, for its lovers in ‘matching Salvation Army pants we’re wearing instead of rings.’ I admired the range of craft in the poem, from a mastery of long lines to the two-columned sections in part 5 that one can read horizontally or vertically with dual pleasure. For the way the poem ends, in quietness and in tension/possibility.”
Kim Garcia is the author of The Brighter House, winner of the 2015 White Pine Press Poetry Prize and finalist for the 2016 Julie Suk Award, DRONE, winner of the 2015 Backwaters Prize, and Madonna Magdalene, released by Turning Point Books in 2006. Her chapbook Tales of the Sisters won the 2015 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest. Garcia teaches creative writing at Boston College.
Judge Gillian Conoley’s most recent collection of poetry, Peace, was named an Academy of American Poets Stand-out Book for 2014 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is the author of eight collections of poetry including The Plot Genie, Profane Halo, Lovers in the Used World, and Tall Stranger, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Conoley’s work has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award, and has been anthologized in more than 20 national and international anthologies, including W.W. Norton’s Postmodern American Poetry (second edition), W.W. Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricism, and Oscar Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana. Conoley’s translations of Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken: Three Books by Henri Michaux, appeared with City Lights in 2014, and was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2014 by Publisher’s Weekly. Conoley has taught as a Visiting Poet at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, University of Denver, Vermont College MFA Program, Texas State University, and Tulane University. The founding editor of Volt, she has taught at Sonoma State University since 1994, where she is Professor of Creative Writing (Poetry).
Preorder Dogwood 2018 at this link, and check back soon for a winner’s announcement in Fiction.
Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry and Prose 