Mark Craver Poetry Award | Judge: George Abraham
Winner: “Mother, Forgive My Insolence" by Arpita Roy
Of the many things I loved here, I was particularly moved by the use of visual form to shape the breath of this poem, on a moment-to-moment level. Although this haunting address to the speaker’s mother is sprawling, in scope and image, every breath is so intentionally and delicately carved into the body of the piece. In a poem brimming with such urgency, every caesura is enlightening: “once you dissolved // into a skyless window / you remember it as the year I counted the flight of midnight // birds / how long have we tried / to hold the joys of this world / and call it ours.” Here, boundaries of consciousness dissolve as easily as boundaries between bodies, familial relations, and the divine. And with the generative, expansive space this poem makes of these dissolutions, the speaker dares to arrive at beauty, dares to pass beyond.
Runner Up: “The Contours of Marriage” by Arianne Elena Payne
From its opening breaths, “The Contours of Marriage” pulled me into the poem, swept me off my feet, and never let me escape in the absolute best ways. There’s such wisdom to this poems attentiveness to sound, both within the crafting of this gorgeous piece, as well as the universe it brings to life: “never the right kind // of light, of love—lashed / with bridal wreath, laughed / & gasped at my groom.”
Runner Up: “Sacrificial Dance” by Keene Carter
“Sacrificial Dance” is a tightly-crafted ekphrasis, meditating on violence, materiality, and grief in such interesting ways. I will never forget this searing ending: “The small burst heart / We loved lies motionless, and it was murder /Until the imitation made it art.”
Joseph A. Lohman III Poetry Award | Judge: Lauren Camp
Winner: “Good Daughter Sestina” by Susan Muth
In this poem, the sestina is used to great effect. The poet interweaves the actuality and metaphor of time, complicating and layering the family dynamics of the subject. The chosen, repeating words unravel new meanings. The poem sounds and feels; it lands in places—from a backyard to a gunroom. By the time we reach the potent line wherein the speaker realizes she must "deface / the diseased wood of the family clock" to move into her own life, we are fully committed to that effort.
Runner Up: “Firepit" by Lee Tury
The sonics of this poem are deeply satisfying, even as the subject feels discomfiting. Though we may want to hold the hurt "soft at our center," it won't be possible. The poem leaves a trail of strong emotions: worry and desperation, all of it out of control.
Mary Roberts Rinehart Poetry Award | Judge: Nicole Cooley
Winner: “Because of the barber pole worms" by Christian Stanzione
I love this poem for its swerves and surprises, its deceptively clear diction, and its deep thinking about loss. In spare and delicate language, the poem explores grief in the most unexpected of ways. I admire the way the poem moves from animal to human bodies and shows the connections between them. And I am fascinated by the distance between “we” and “I” here as the poem progresses. The poem’s ending is nothing short of dazzling. As well, the line breaks here are innovative and expressive, and the tension between line and sentence heightens the imagery throughout of breaking and burying. Finally, I love this poem’s cadence and play with sound.
Runner Up: “Song” by Lloyd Wallace
This beautiful poem is full of sharp and vivid details, and I love the way it explores questions about the construction of the self. The final simile is original and emotionally moving.
Virginia Downs Poetry Award | Judge: Aaron Coleman
Winner: "Diamond Daughter” by Arianne Elena Payne
There were many poignant, skilled, and compassionate poems submitted to this year’s Virginia Downs Poetry Award (it was so hard to choose just one!), but I was deeply moved by the ways that “Diamond Daughter” refracts and distills the complexities of a young life in a contentious world. This poem speaks and shines with a light all its own. The vulnerable, reflective heart of “Diamond Daughter” comes to life via striking images and music. The poet crafts a kaleidoscopic lens through which we see a speaker whirling amidst personal, familial, and societal expectations. Grappling with desire and longing as much as guilt and sorrow, the poet finds a way into a wisdom born from “knowing/the brilliant landscape of her mom’s forehead, worry” and “the price/some parents pay for a future is the present...” This courageous poem covers so much ground, paced by its fluid syntax, crisp plainspoken moments, lyric leaps, and deft imagery.
Runner Up: "on incurability" by Jace Raymond Smellie & "transition" by Lee Tury
Mary Roberts Rinehart Nonfiction Award | Judge: Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
Winner: "Cabrillo National Monument, 2019" by Jenny Fried
A simultaneously bleak and hopeful stunner of a memoir. The present-tense works to keep us tied to the narrator's consciousness—inhabiting a self-aware and humorous perspective—and allows her interiority to be the driving force. The close observations of people acting absurdly like people in the world around her are compelling and brutal. The voice is wonderful, and I could have read pages more of it.
Runner Up: "Visions of Ursula” by Ashlen Renner
"Visions of Ursula" is a well-researched and ambitious, expansive essay, seeking and building connections between events nearly a millennium apart. The ekphrastic nature of the writing—and the inclusion of the artwork in the essay itself—keeps the reader grounded in something separate from the narrator. A lovely piece.
Alan Cheuse Nonfiction Award | Judge: Ashon Crawley
Winner: "This Ceaseless Procession of Mes" by Kevin J. Binder
"This Ceaseless Procession of Mes"—How do we know what consciousness is, and what would be the method to find this out? The state between the dreamworld and being awake, this essay lets readers ponder the relationship between what we know of ourselves and what we forget, how we are continually being remade and how memory is itself a process of selection, choice, a hoped-for past. As the writing unfolded, its complexity intensified, though the language remained consistent, even, approachable. The author does a great job of helping readers have a sense perception for the sensual registers he felt as he experienced the memories, the gaps in memories, the filling in of those gaps with guesses and estimations and hopes. A joy to read.
Runner Up: "Boy Story" by Jenny Fried
"Boy Story"—a deeply moving meditation on the process of becoming-boy, of boyhood, and how even though the concept is created in relation and thus has no essential nature, the concept is also produced by exclusion. The author demonstrates the tenderness of boyhood unobstructed by the desire to be a boy, but also what happens when that tenderness is interrupted. A lovely piece.
Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Award | Judge: Kathy Flann
Winner: “Quarterfold” by Farheen Raparthi
I admired this exquisite story for its layers of confinement. There's a secret confined deep within Sumiya's conscience, a long-standing guilt for something that happened in her youth -- a secret she has kept even from her spouse. In her mind, her fertility issues are a punishment for it, another kind of confinement. All of this takes place in the single setting of Row 19 of a long-haul airplane flight, and we all know how confining those seats are. It's difficult to create "action" in a circumstance like this, but everything in the story folds in on itself in a breathtaking way. An unforgettable story.
Runner Up: “Honeycomb" by Katy Mullins
"Honeycomb" is a collage of scenes featuring young sisters who use make-believe to see their late mother. As I re-read this very short story, I saw its shape more and more -- these tiny, sweet cells that together form a larger story of shared sacrifice and loss.
Alan Cheuse Fiction Award | Judge: Brian Castleberry
Winner: "Get Back On, If You Fall" by Bodie Fox
This story’s awkward, funny, and well-observed detail hooked me from the beginning. Its author maintains a pitch-perfect voice throughout, showing through a minimalist style the lives of characters wholly of our time: both peripatetic and stuck, confused about what they want, sure that the solution to their problems will be delivered by twenty-first century media. There is great depth here in what’s left unsaid or off the page, and at every step the author has made room for their characters to define themselves, to be complicated and messy and—yes, again—funny.
Runner Up: "Blood Sport" by Farheen Raparthi
I loved this story’s central character—one of those classically observant and sensitive protagonists who are seeking to understand a world around them which may not be understandable. The payoff of its early set-up, and all that happens in between, reveal an author working at the top of their game. The nimble use of setting, the sharp character dynamics of the family, and the ever-present sense of living on the edge of disaster make this a timely and necessary work of short fiction.
Dan Rudy Fiction Award | Judge: Ilana Masad
Winner: “Flock” by Emilie Knudsen
The language in this story captured me from the very start. I loved the fabulist element of the bird-twin/shadow as well as the way the author managed to move us through Ilse's whole life. The different forms that were explored - first person narration, a description of a photography portfolio alongside the third person narrative that opens and closes the story and reappears throughout - struck me as working wonderfully together. I was really gripped and moved from start to finish.
Runner Up: “SONS” by Bodie Fox
I loved the flow of this brief gut-punch of a story, the imagery, and the love that echoed through it alongside and despite the main character's confusion and uncertainty regarding the life her childhood friend is living.
Runner Up: “Still Life” by Katy Mullins
"Still Life", a beautiful slow-burn story that accumulates meaning over the pages and left me feeling a little bit haunted.
Shelley A. Marshall Fiction Award | Judge: Xhenet Aliu
Winner: "The Eternal Hourglass" by Kevin J. Binder
Set primarily on a barrier island in the hours before Hurricane Zeta's landfall--with the obliteration of the isle already all but predetermined--"The Eternal Hourglass" foregrounds human vulnerability and culpability in the face of climate catastrophe while remaining an intimate, character-focused study of two unlikely consorts working together to futilely stave off disaster. It's clear that Tara's impact on the story's narrator, Randy, has been more indelible than the sandbags they stacked to protect Rose Isle's vulnerable levee, though the outcome of both the human and the ecological fortifications is the same: too little, too late. Anchored by a rueful but understated narration, the story is never reduced to mere metaphor or parable despite the epic themes; the language is elegant, plain, and devastating in its directness.
Runner up: "Alphabet Soup" by Chelsea Lebron
In "Alphabet Soup," the narrator uses letters of the alphabet to describe the physical shape of the women around her: her largely absent mother, the entirely absent mother of the girl who becomes her de facto "sister," herself, and Paulina, the character whose figure transforms most dramatically from l to lowercase d to capital D as she grows from a lanky girl to one faced with an unplanned pregnancy. The struggles of these characters--the American-born children of a Latin American diaspora--are conveyed in a language that's organic and not performative, an idiosyncratic amalgam of adolescent and adult.
For more information about the judges and contests, click here.
April 15, 2022
