Gillian Vik Wins the 2019 Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry

The editors are pleased to announce that Poetry Judge Lia Purpura has chosen Gillian Vik’s poem “The Cancer Menagerie” as this year’s Poetry Prize Winner in the Dogwood Literary Prize in Poetry.  Ms. Vik will receive $1,000 and her poem will be published in Dogwood’s 2019 edition.  Finalists for the prize were Madelyn Garner, Lea Graham, Shirley Jones-Luke, AKaiser, Steve Lautermilch, Madeline Miele, Heather Palmer, Robyn Maree Pickens, Mara Adamitz Scrupe, Matthew J. Spireng, and Richard Weaver, each of whose work will also appear in Dogwood 2019, due out in May.

In her citation choosing Vik’s poem, “The Cancer Menagerie,” Judge Lia Purpura wrote, “‘I love the tautness of this poem and the unsettling tension between comfort and threat. The objects and contingenices of this conceit are beautifully sustained. I very much appreciate the ways the narrator moves slowly and carefully, assiduously taking note of seemingly small particulars which are allowed to accrete and gather momentum – a perfect way of establishing a sense of witness in strange, unknown territory. Fantastic work.”

Gillian Vik lives in Seattle, where she has a private psychotherapy practice.  She studied poetry at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and belongs to the writing collective Secret Governance.  Her first collection of poetry is due out in 2020.

Judge Lia Purpura is the author of eight collections of essays, poems, and translations, most recently a collection of poems, It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful (Penguin.) On Looking (essays, Sarabande Books) was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her awards include Guggenheim, NEA, and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, the Associated Writing Programs Award in Nonfiction, and others.  Her work appears in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Orion, The Paris Review, The Georgia Review, Agni, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore, MD, is Writer in Residence at The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop’s MFA program.

Congratulations to all our winners, and watch for the release of Dogwood issue 18 in May!