MQR Announces Annual Literary Prizes

We are delighted to announce this year’s winners of the The Laurence Goldstein Prize, The Page Davidson Clayton Prize For Emerging Poets, and The Lawrence Prize, which are given annually to poets and fiction writers featured in Michigan Quarterly Review.

This year’s prizes were judged by Raymond McDaniel and Michael Byers.

The Laurence Goldstein Prize, chosen by Raymond McDaniel, is awarded to Jasmine V. Bailey, for her poem,“This is Not a Poem About Leah, Let Alone Zilpah and Bilhah,” from Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 2018.

It’s impossible to disregard the authority in “This Is Not a Poem about Leah, Let Alone Zilpah and Bilhah,” a poem that in relatively little space communicates both ancient, matter-of-fact deliberation and contemporary urgency and immediacy, Jasmine Bailey seems to be drawing from a well so deep that it goes all the way through the earth, starting with what we can be tempted to forget and leaving us at the edge of what we might wish to deny. This poem won’t let us. It’s indelible and irresistible, patient in what it details and furiously resolute in its demands. –Raymond McDaniel

Jasmine V. Bailey’s first poetry collection, Alexandria, was published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2014 and won the Central New York Book Award. Her second collection, Disappeared, was published October, 2017 from Carnegie Mellon, and her chapbook, Sleep and What Precedes It, won the 2009 Longleaf Press Chapbook Prize. She has been an Olive B. O’Connor Fellow at Colgate University, a Fulbright Fellow in Argentina, and a fellow at the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems, essays, and translations have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly, 32 Poems, Crab Orchard Review, Two Lines, InTranslation, and other journals. Her work was a finalist for the 2018 Gulf Coat Translation Prize, and she is a managing editor for Iron Horse Literary Review and a contributing editor for Waxwing Literary Journal.

The Laurence Goldstein Prize was established in 2002 by a generous gift from the Office of the President of the University of Michigan and is awarded in the amount of $500. A different judge is selected each year by the university.

The Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, chosen by Raymond McDaniel, is awarded to Nkosi Nkululeko, for his poem, “Recordable,” from Michigan Quarterly Review, Spring 2018.

In “Recordable” Nkosi Nkuleko performs a kind of magic trick, in that the deceptively offhanded presentation, its ease and clarity, invites the reader to feel a sort of comfort that the speaker does not and cannot share, and which by the poem’s end upsets both what the reader assumes about what such direct, descriptive reportage is for and their sense of the speaker offering it. Metaphysics here is as lucid as a medical chart, and yet somehow all the more mysterious for that apparent discrepancy, which Nkuleko naturalizes so subtly that you can feel it happen without noticing when and how that naturalization occurs.–Raymond McDaniel

Nkosi Nkululeko, writer, chess instructor, and musician, is a 2017 Poets House fellow. He is a current Book Reviewer for Winter Tangerine. Nkosi’s work is published or forthcoming in Callaloo, The Collagist, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Offing, Ploughshares, Third Coast, and more. His poem “Skin Deep,” formerly published by The Adroit Journal, was selected by guest editor Dana Gioia for The Best American Poetry 2018 anthology (Scribner, 2018). Nkosi Nkululeko lives in Harlem, New York.

The Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets was established in 2009 by a generous gift from Meg and Mac Clayton in honor of Mac Clayton’s mother and in support of poetry and the development of new poets. The Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets is awarded annually to the best poet appearing in MQR who has not yet published a book. The award is in the amount of $500.

The Lawrence Prize, chosen by Michael Byers, is awarded to Elizabeth Gaffney for her story, “Six-X,” from Michigan Quarterly Review, Summer 2018.

Elizabeth Gaffney’s precise and gripping story demonstrates how much can be done in a small space when the world is drawn with care and expertise; like any excellent piece of short fiction, “Six-X” is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, a tiny door opening on an enormous room. Fitting, then, that Gaffney’s people are set so close to the unknown, and that uncertainty, wonder, and an ambitious, toothy curiosity drive the action and help bring about the story’s vivid, thrashing end–Michael Byers

Elizabeth Gaffney is a native Brooklynite. She graduated with honors from Vassar College and holds an M.F.A. in fiction from Brooklyn College; she also studied philosophy and German at Ludwig-Maximillian University in Munich. Her first novel, Metropolis, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, was published by Random House in 2005. Her second novel, When the World Was Young, was published by Random House in 2014. Her stories have appeared in many literary magazines, and she has translated four books from German. She is currently working on her third historical novel, a novel-in-stories that includes the story “Six-X,” that was published in MQR, and a middle-grade novel about two deaf girls, set in Brooklyn, NY.Gaffney has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center. She also teaches fiction at New York University and Queens University, NC, and serves as the editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, the neurologist Alex Boro, and their two daughters.

The Lawrence Foundation Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. Gaffney is the forty-first winner of the prize, joining, among other authors, Charles Baxter, Paul Bowles, Susan Dodd, Clark Blaise, Sena Jeter Naslund, Rebecca Makkai, Alice Mattison, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The prize is $1,000, endowed by the Lawrence Foundation and its director, Leonard S. Bernstein, an alumnus of the University of Michigan and himself a fiction writer.

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