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2023 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winners

close up photo of book pages

We received 74 total submissions. The first round was read by Joshua Robbins and Darius Stewart. Winners were chosen from a shortlist of amazing work by final judge, Marilyn Kallet, Knoxville Poet Laureate from June 27th, 2018-July 2020. For more information about the contest and the judges, visit The Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Submission Page.

Winner

Amanda Chimera, by Mary B Moore

Mary B. Moore’s five poetry books include Dear If, Orison Books 2022; Flicker, Dogfish Head Prize 2016; The Book Of Snow, Cleveland State U Poetry Center 1998; the prize-winning chapbooks are Amanda and the Man Soul 2017, and Eating the Light 2016.

Mary’s poems appear lately in Birmingham Poetry Review (BPR), Poetry, Prairie Schooner, NELLE, Nimrod, Gettysburg Review, Terrain, and more. She has won Birmingham Review’s Collins Prize and NELLE’s Three Sisters Award, and she won second place in Nimrod’s 2017 Pablo Neruda Award, and third in Terrain’s awards.

Runner Up

Incidental Pollen, by Ellen Austin-Li

Ellen Austin-Li’s work appears in Artemis, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Salamander, Lily Poetry Review, Rust + Moth, and many other places. Finishing Line Press published her chapbooks—Firefly (2019) & Lockdown: Scenes From Early in the Pandemic (2021).

Ellen is a Best of the Net nominee. A Martin B. Bernstein Fellowship recipient, she earned an MFA in Poetry at the Solstice Low-Residency Program. Ellen co-founded the monthly reading series, “Poetry Night at Sitwell’s,” in Cincinnati, where she lives with her husband in a newly empty nest. You can find her at www.ellenaustinli.me.

Honorable Mention

Red Camaro, by Dwaine Rieves

Thanks much for reading and considering Red Camaro…very kind…all best.

Dwaine Rieves is a medical imaging scientist in Washington, DC. His collection, When the Eye Forms, won the Tupelo Press Prize for Poetry.

Short List

  • Four Junes, by Sara Dudo
  • The Ugliest Girl in Columbiana County, by Elizabeth Tussey
  • Kentucky Pathways, by David Cazden
  • Everywhere, Everywhere, by Jeffrey Bean
  • A Legacy of Birds, by Sharon Ackerman

Previous Winners

2022

The winner: a poem is a house, linda ravenswood

a poem is a house pushes against the borders of poetry to emphasize how all borders are a construct: geopolitical, literary, and personal. Each poem in this outstanding collection reinvents itself, employing a range of forms, such as visual poems and broken poetry cycles, to recreate vivid details of the speaker’s experiences as someone who grew up in California with Mexican ancestry. Readers experience a state of bardo,
a sense of existing between states: between different cultures, between safety and violence, and perhaps most of all, between past and present. Like memory itself, these poems thrive on elision, repetition, and reversal. a poem is a house is a dazzling accomplishment that presents a new and unique poetic vision. —Charlotte Pence, final judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, and author of Code

The runner-up: Tasting Flight: Poems by Yiskah Rosenfeld

A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to
internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flightis a book that sings back to the exploding
stars. —Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize

2021

The winner: The Parting Glass: Poems by Lisa J. Parker

The Parting Glass, like the old Irish song, is a toast to the places and people who make up the author’s roots and base. However Appalachian at its root, it tells a universal story about what grounds and keeps us, even as we move in cities and circles far from home. At its core, this book brings the thread of downhome with its voices and song, to the cities and cultures the author moves through. The poems raise a glass to those still at the table and to those already gone, to homecomings and deployments, to the navigation of love and grief.

The Parting Glass: Poems by Lisa J. Parker front cover is a photograph of a snowy landscape across a plane to a horizontal line of trees beneath a bright blue sky. One set of footprints leads to the trees.
Splinter, poems by Susan O'Dell Underwood. Weathered yellow board with red lettering for title.

The runner-up: Splinter by Susan O’Dell Underwood

A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to
internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flightis a book that sings back to the exploding
stars. —Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize

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2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize Winners

A photo of poet Linda Ravenswood.

Madville is pleased to announce that linda ravenswood‘s poetry collection, a poem is a house, is the winner of our 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, judged by Charlotte Pence!

Yiskah Rosenfeld was the first runner-up with her collection Tasting Flight.

We received 52 total submissions. The first round was read by Candance Reaves and Catherine Pritchard Childress, and winners were chosen from a shortlist of amazing work by 

a poem is a house

by linda ravenswood

Winner of The 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
Upcoming publication date Spring 2024

A photo of poet Linda Ravenswood.

“a poem is a house pushes against the borders of poetry to emphasize how all borders are a construct: geopolitical, literary, and personal. Each poem in this outstanding collection reinvents itself, employing a range of forms, such as visual poems and broken poetry cycles, to recreate vivid details of the speaker’s experiences as someone who grew up in California with Mexican ancestry.

Throughout this book, readers experience a state of bardo, a sense of existing between states: between different cultures, between safety and violence, and perhaps most of all, between past and present. Like memory itself, these poems thrive on elision, repetition, and reversal. Take for example an evocative poem placed early in the book: ‘To live at the scene of an accident.’ The two-line poem simple states: ‘To go on living / at the scene of the crime.’ Such sparsity emphasizes the stark reality of the situation and faces it directly without adorned language that could distract from the fact’s horror. What’s more, the book presents readers with four variations of this poem, emphasizing how trauma is not only situated in the past, but something that interrupts the present—and never leaves the body.

One poem tells readers that ‘this is not really a lullaby for the end of the world this is a map to the beginning of the body.’ Such a statement is not a dichotomy, but simply a reality wherein grief and celebration share spaces. a poem is a house is a dazzling accomplishment that presents a new and unique poetic vision.”

—Charlotte Pence, final judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize, and author of Code

linda ravenswood is a poet and performance artist from Los Angeles and the founder and editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Press. Her previous books include Cantadora — Letters from California, The Stan Poems, Tlacuilx, X LA Poets, and Hymnal.

Tasting Flight

by Yiskah Rosenfeld

Finalist for The 2022 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize
Upcoming publication date Spring 2024

“A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually, but searches to internalize such knowledge as in this breathtaking poem ‘Bird Call Koan with Glossary’:

Across the hall I lay in the dark contemplating this, the infinitely expanding universe of what I don’t know. Stars exploding and being born. Moons in our own solar system still uncounted. And yet some things I think I know with certainty: I’m not pretty. I don’t deserve to be loved. 

If I trill my mating call, who will answer me? 

I forget the moon is always whole.

These lines are representative of the well-crafted poetry readers will find in this book, each poem creating scenes with such vivid details, readers feel as if they are with the speaker, perhaps as an adult gazing at the stars or as a child hiding behind the Life cereal box.  Not only are the details engaging, but the form of each poem closely aligns with its subject, be it in the form of a question mark or the dwindling lines in ‘Submission Guidelines.’ All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flight is a book that sings back to the exploding stars.

Yiskah Rosenfeld balances solo parenting with freelance teaching in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry has appeared in The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Lilith Magazine, Rattle, Cottonwood, Full: An Anthology of Moon Poems, and The Ravens Perch.

The longlist included:

     

      • Only the Finest Track Stars Smoke Newports by Susan Leary

    The shortlist included: