Winners & Finalists

Paisley Rekdal is the author of four books of nonfiction and seven books of poetry, including Nightingale, Appropriate: A Provocation, and, most recently, West: A Translation. She is the editor and creator of the West, Mapping Literary Utah digital archive projects, and Mapping Salt Lake City. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes, the Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. The former Utah poet laureate, she teaches at the University of Utah, where she directs the American West Center.

Jacqui Germain’s debut poetry collection, Bittering the Wound, was selected by Douglas Kearney for the 2021 CAAPP Book Prize. She lives and works as a journalist in St. Louis, Missouri. She has received poetry and journalism fellowships from the Economic Security Project, the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission, Jack Jones Literary Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, and more.

Franny Choi is the author of The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2022), Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019), winner of the Elgin Award for Science Fiction Poetry, and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, the Nation, and elsewhere. She is a professor at Bennington College and the founder of Brew & Forge, a project that builds connections between writers, organizers, and movement workers. The current Poet Laureate of Northampton, MA, Franny is working on a forthcoming essay collection about race and robots in the popular imagination.

John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet, essayist, historian, translator, and Protactile educator. His two latest books are How to Communicate: Poems, which won the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Touch the Future: A Manifesto in Essays. W. W. Norton and Company published both. He makes a home in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his partner, the ASL Deaf artist Adrean Clark, their three kids, and two cats.

Charif Shanahan is the author of Trace Evidence: poems (Tin House, 2023), which is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and was long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award. He is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder (Milkweed Editions 2018), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions 2019), and, most recently, Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023). Her poems have appeared widely, including in The Hopkins Review, TriQuarterly, The Missouri Review, Bennington Review, and The Kenyon Review , and were featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. A 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow and the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize winner, she lives in the Twin Cities.

Paul Hlava Ceballos is the author of Banana [ ], winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Washington State Book Award. His collaborative chapbook, Banana [ ] / We Pilot the Blood, shares pages with Quenton Baker and Christina Sharpe. He has fellowships from CantoMundo and the Poets House. He has been featured on the Poetry Magazine Podcast and Seattle’s The Stranger. He currently lives with his family in Seattle, where he practices echocardiography .

Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and a finalist for both the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her poems have three times appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. In 2023, Codjoe was appointed the second Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award.

K. Iver is a nonbinary trans poet born in Mississippi. Their debut collection, Short Film Starring My Beloved’s Red Bronco, won the 2022 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry from Milkweed Editions and was named the Best Book of 2023 by the New York Public Library. Their poems have appeared in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, LA Review of Books, and elsewhere. Iver has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. They have a Ph.D. in Poetry from Florida State University. They are the Roger F. Murray Chair in Creative Writing at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.

Arthur Kayzakian won the 2021 inaugural Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series for his collection, The Book of Redacted Paintings, and was also selected as a finalist for the 2021 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. He is the recipient of the 2023 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He serves as the Poetry Chair for the International Armenian Literary Alliance.