Celebrating our 2022 Dogwood Winner in Poetry!

Congratulations Hannah Dierdorff, Winner of the 2022 Dogwood Literary Award in Poetry

The editors are pleased to announce that judge Frederick-Douglass Knowles has named Hannah Dierdorff’s poem “Only a Quarter of Species May Survive the End of the Century” as the winner of 2022 Dogwood Literary Ward in Poetry. Ms. Dierdorff will receive $1,000 and her poem will be published in Dogwood’s 2022 edition. Finalists for the poetry award were Elise Ball, B.J. Buckley, Shirley Jones Luke, Molly Lanzarotta, Steve Lautermilch, Fleeming Meeks, Valerie Smith, Sal Ragen, and John Sibley Williams, whose work will also appear in Dogwood 2022, due out in late May.

In his citation on Dierdorff’s poem, Knowles wrote “The poem elucidates the consequences of careless human behavior (past and present), whether it be loss of love, or loss of nature. The diction illustrates vivid scenes of imagery that catapult the reader into the ‘acidifying’ waves of the ‘sea.’ The style of the poem is as riveting and challenging as the solutions to love and climate change.”

Hannah Dierdorff, originally from Eastern Washington, is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at the University of Virginia, where she teaches poetry and writing. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Worcester Review, Cut Bank, and Permafrost.

Frederick-Douglass Knowles II is an educator and activist fervent in achieving community augmentation through the literary arts. He is a professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in his native city of Norwich, Connecticut, and the inaugural Poet Laureate of Hartford. He is the recipient of the Nutmeg Poetry Award and is the Connecticut Office of the Arts Fellow in Artistic Excellence in Poetry/Creative Nonfiction. Knowles is a Pushcart Prize Nominee and the author of BlackRoseCity.