MQR is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Page Davidson Clayton and Lawrence Foundation Prizes.
Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets
Created in 2009 by Mac and Meg Clayton to honor the memory of Page Davidson Clayton, The Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets is awarded by the editors each year to the best poet appearing in Michigan Quarterly Review who has yet to publish a book. The Clayton Prize is a $500 cash award. Learn more about the Clayton Prize.
Winner, Kristene Kaye Brown, “Why I Stopped Watering the Plants,” which appeared in MQR‘s Spring 2021 Issue. You can read the poem here.
“This poem is an absolute delight on the tongue. Try aloud “as if stunned by the sky’s expanse.” In short couplets, this poem unfolds ever so smoothly. Right away, Brown starts making an argument, that “hunger” suggests “hope,” and later, that “desperation” is where “superstition grows.” Despite these bold claims about how things are, they don’t seem enough to sustain the speaker, who closes with unspoken memories pressing in. Instead, I see these arguments as invitations to ask what waters what in this life, or what feelings beget others. And if it is “resisting that erodes” what does acceptance offer? This is the experiment the speaker ends on – no more watering, no more resisting, then see what comes.” -Katie Willingham
Kristene Kaye Brown is a mental health social worker. She earned her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been featured on NPR and published most recently in New South, Nimrod, Ploughshares, Salt Hill, and others. She lives and works in Kansas City.
The Lawrence Foundation Prize
The Michigan Quarterly Review’s $2,000 Lawrence Prize in fiction is awarded annually to the best story published in MQR that year. Established in 1978, the prize is sponsored by University of Michigan alumnus and fiction writer Leonard S. Bernstein, a trustee of the Lawrence Foundation of New York. More about the Lawrence Prize.
Winner, Naomi Shuyama-Gómez’s “The Commander’s Teeth,” which appeared in MQR’s Fall 2021 Issue. MQR Online published an excerpt of the story earlier this year.
“Is there a place more intimate, vulnerable, and latently violent than a human mouth? Naomi Shuyama-Gómez explores this fraught terrain in her stunning story, “The Commander’s Teeth,” centering her tale around Emilia, a dental student completing her training in rural Colombia. Emilia is observant, unsentimental, alive to the details of her work—shovel-shaped incisors and ajar bicuspids, the rot that signals disease—and the particular danger of her situation. I admire “The Commander’s Teeth” for its deft plot (page after page, the tension is unbearable) and surprising relationships, but it’s the sentences that make it unforgettable. The images are often so beautiful the horror sparking them takes a moment to sink in—a bit of dissonance that troubles the imagination and gives the story a life outside of its pages. Naomi Shuyama-Gómez is a thrilling talent and I can’t wait to read more from her.” -Julie Buntin
Naomi Shuyama-Gómez was born in Cali, Colombia. She was raised in New Jersey and Querétaro. Her fiction and poetry appear in The Florida Review, the minnesota review, Mount Hope Literary Journal, Reflex Flash Fiction, and Rigorous Literary Journal. She holds a M.A. in English from Seton Hall University and has received scholarships and fellowships from CRIT Works LLC., Kundiman, Immigrant Writers’ Workshop, New York State Summer Writer’s Institute, and Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
