Featuring Rick Barot, judge, and the 2022 recipient. Produced in partnership with the Auburn Department of English and Southern Humanities Review.
A prize of $1,000 and publication in Southern Humanities Review is given annually for a poem of witness in honor of the late poet Jake Adam York. The winner also receives travel expenses to give a reading at a poetry event at Auburn University in Alabama in October with the contest judge.
This year’s judge is Rick Barot, author of The Galleons (Milkweed Editions, 2020) and professor at Pacific Lutheran University.
This year’s winner is Daniel Donaghy for his poem “Tulsa Triptych.”
From Rick Barot:
“Bringing together documentary amplitude and lyric intimacy, “Tulsa Triptych” takes a neglected piece of the American story and brings it into the light of the present. The story it tells is full of violence, which only reminds us that our story has always had that violence as a kind of fundament, up through the social and political calamities of recent years, recent months, and even recent days. But more than just recovering a necessary story, “Tulsa Triptych” is also an instance of canny formal presentation. Shifting from incantatory catalogue, focused scene, to bitter ekphrasis, the poem uses as many of the resources of poetry as it can–understandably and movingly so, given all that’s at stake in the specific story it tells and the larger American story that it implicates.”
Free and open to the public. Our Livestream begins at 6:30 p.m.
