Arts & Humanities Campus News

2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize winner named

The Georgia Review congratulates Hannah Perrin King, who was selected by judge Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the eighth annual Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. King will receive $1,500 for her poem, “Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague,” which will appear in the Spring 2021 issue.

Of the winning poem, Kaminsky wrote, “This poem is able to bring together form and content in a way that’s spellbinding. An incantation of anaphoric repetition is used here to punctuate a journey, to accelerate it, to reveal its many implications.” The Georgia Review will host both Kaminsky and King for a reading this spring, pending safety precautions from the COVID-19 pandemic.

King is the winner of Narrative Magazine’s 11th annual poetry contest and the winner of AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry, as well as New Millennium Writings’ 48th New Millennium Award for Poetry. King’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Narrative Magazine, The Missouri ReviewThe Cincinnati ReviewThe Adroit JournalNorth American ReviewTHRUSH Poetry Journal and Best New Poets, among others. She’s the recipient of a Tin House summer workshop scholarship and her first manuscript is a National Poetry Series finalist. She currently lives in rural California.

2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize winner and finalists

Winner:

Hannah Perrin King, “Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague”

Finalists:

  • Taylor Bell, “Death of a Talisman”
  • Joshua Burton, “Elegy for Threats with Grace”
  • Imani Cezanne, “I found this poem in the kitchen”
  • Clare Chu, “Palimpsest”
  • Alexei Perry Cox, “My Homeland”
  • Chelsea DesAutels, “Maybe You Need to Write a Poem about Mercy”
  • Lupita Eyde-Tucker, “Guaranda”
  • Bernard Ferguson, “far past the beginning and quite close to the end,”
  • Diamond Forde, “Collard Greens and Ham Hocks, or What to Do When the Bill’s Due”
  • Caroline Goodwin, “228,057 Galium aparine Our Lady’s Bedstraw 04-30-20 0922 PD”
  • Sarah Gridley, “The Reeds”
  • Juan Luis Guzman, “Surrounded by Peach Trees in Bloom, President Clinton Speaks to My Fourth Grade Class”
  • David Landon, “Father’s Day: Looking West”
  • Daniel Lassell, “Edge markers”
  • Mihaela Moscaliuc, “Lovage”
  • Dean Rader, “Origin”
  • Serena Rodriguez, “mississippi waning”
  • Chivas Sandage, “summertime in america”
  • Darius Simpson, “Cain”
  • Arthur Solway, “Beckett’s Tree”
  • Betsy Tighe, “The St. Petersburg, FL, Cigar Factory Employs a Reader”
  • Ping Wang, “How a Droplet Becomes a Tsunami”
  • Michael Weinstein, “Drone Pastoral”
  • Shuyi Yin, “A Young Man Confronts the Nothing That Is”