Here is a sneak peak at the front covers for the 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize first prize winner and runner up. They’ll be coming out in spring 2027, and as always, our judges did an amazing job selecting the winners!
Follow the link below if you want a refresher about the history of the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. All the past winners and judges are listed there.
The winners have been named and notified for the 2025 Arthur Smith Poetry Prize. We hope you will join us in congratulating them.
“All six books [on the shortlist] had strengths, but I kept coming back to these two.”–Jeff Hardin
A Heart that Stretches the Length of the Body by David Prather
Winner
David B. Prather is the author of three poetry collections: We Were Birds (Main Street Rag, 2019), Shouting at an Empty House (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2023), and Bending Light with Bare Hands: A Journal of Poems (Fernwood Press, 2025). His work has appeared in many publications, including New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Poet Lore, The Comstock Review, etc. He lives in Parkersburg, WV. Website: www.davidbprather.com
My Out-Migrations by Elaine Palencia
First Runner Up
Elaine Fowler Palencia grew up in Morehead, KY, and Cookeville, TN. She is the author of six books of fiction, four poetry chapbooks, and two works of nonfiction. Her most recent book is On Rising Ground: The Life and Civil War Letters of John M. Douthit, 52nd Georgia Volunteer Infantry Regiment (Mercer U. Press), about her great-great grandfather. Her work has received eight Pushcart Prize nominations and other prizes. She is the book review editor of Pegasus, journal of the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and the longtime moderator of the Red Herring Prose Workshop. Much of her writing is place-based.
This list of Six titles was selected by our preliminary readers, Karen George and Brian Griffin. And we thank them dearly for their time and attention over the months of submissions.
This page links to all the books we have out that have won our annual poetry prize named for beloved Appalachian poet, Arthur Smith. To read about the 2024 winners currently in production and to find out when we are accepting submissions for consideration, visit THIS PAGE.
Our head judge for 2025 was Jeff Hardin, a long-time friend of Arthur Smith. Jeff made the hard hard decision about which collections should be the “winners.” All three judges said they were truly impressed with the quality of the submissions, which made the decisions really difficult. (Thanks so much to all who submitted!)
Jeff Hardin is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Watermark, A Clearing Space in the Middle of Being, No Other Kind of World, and Small Revolution. His work has been honored with the Nicholas Roerich Prize, the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, and the X. J. Kennedy Prize. Originally from Savannah, Tennessee, he has taught for almost three decades at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee.
Photo: A. J. Holmes
Karen George is author of the poetry collections Swim Your Way Back (2014), A Map and One Year (2018), Where Wind Tastes Like Pears (2021), Caught in the Trembling Net (2024), and forthcoming Delight Is a Field. She won Slippery Elm’s 2022 Poetry Contest, and her award-winning short story collection, How We Fracture, was released by Minerva Rising Press in 2024. She is the recipient of grants from Kentucky Foundation for Women and Kentucky Arts Council. Her poetry appears in The Ekphrastic Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Lily Poetry Review, and Poet Lore. Her latest book Caught in the Trembling Net, published by Kelsay Books, was inspired by the art, life, and writings of Frida Kahlo, Georgia, O’Keeffe, and Emily Carr. Her website is https://karenlgeorge.blogspot.com/.
Brian Griffin holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. A former Director of Lifespan Religious Education at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, he has taught at The University of Virginia, The University of Tennessee, and Pellissippi State Community College. His fiction and poetry appears in a number of literary journals, including Shenandoah, Mississippi Review, New Millennium Writings, Asheville Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Poems and Plays, Snake Nation Review, Clockwatch Review, New Delta Review, The Distillery, Mixitini Matrix, A Tapestry of Voices: An East Tennessee Anthology, Knoxville Bound, Metro Pulse, Number Inc, and elsewhere. He received the Mary McCarthy Award for Short Fiction for his collection Sparkman in the Sky and Other Stories. Single Lens Reflex, his collection of poems about surviving a domestic terrorist attack, was a finalist in the 2018 National Poetry Series. It was published in 2024 by Iris Press.
We are running slightly behind schedule with this, but we are thrilled to announce that we have a winner of the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize for 2024! With 110 total submissions, and only three people reading, it took us a little while. The work was all so very good.
Animal Psalm – THE WINNER
by DeAnna Stephens
Stephens’s work has appeared in numerous journals including Cherry Tree, Feminist Studies, and Louisiana Literature and has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, her work has received the George Scarbrough Prize for Poetry (Mountain Heritage Literary Festival), the Sue Ellen Hudson Excellence in Writing Award from Tennessee Mountain Writers, the Tusculum Review Poetry Prize, and the Tennessee Williams Festival Poetry Prize. She is the author of a chapbook, Heliotaxis, (Main Street Rag), and was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame in 2022. She currently serves as a reader for Rowayat and teaches writing, reading, and literature at Roane State Community College in Crossville, Tennessee.
No Lace Fronts in Iowa City – FIRST RUNNER UP
by Meghan Malachi
Meghan B. Malachi is a Bronx-born, Chicago-based poet and educator. She is an Associate Editor at RHINO and the Programming Coordinator at the Guild Literary Complex. Meghan is the first-place winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review 2022 Editor’s Prize Contest and a 2022 Pushcart Prize Nominee. She has also been a finalist for the 2024 Hillary Tham Capital Collection as well as the 2024 Lois Cranston Memorial Prize. Her work is published in Milly Magazine, Rabid Oak, Juked, NECTAR Poetry, Writers with Attitude, and NewCity. Her first chapbook, The Autodidact, was published by Ethel Zine & Micro Press in 2020. She teaches rhetoric and writing at Harold Washington College and Saint Xavier University.
The winning poet receives a $1,000 advance, a standard royalty contract, and 10 copies of the published book. Finalists will also be considered for future publication.
Judge: Allison Joseph
Readers: Edison Jennings and Shlagha Borah
This anthology of poems and short stories is an homage to Texas singer/song-writer Robert Earl Keen, who stands in the songwriter/storyteller tradition of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, John Prine, and Keen’s contemporaries Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry. The poems and short stories here are each inspired by Keen’s songs, some expansions of themes of Keen’s songs, others move in creative directions suggested by the characters in his work. Keen’s songs are impressive for their literary sensibility (he was an English major at Texas A&M University) and have influenced many songwriters as well as authors of fiction and poetry.
South Carolina natives Sandra Johnson Cooper and Ron Cooper have lived in Florida since 1988 and have been fans of Robert Earl Keen for nearly as long. They both teach at the College of Central Florida where Sandra specializes in American literature, and Ron specializes in philosophy and world religions.
