The Georgia Review is proud to offer congratulations to Hannah Perrin King, who was selected by judge Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the eighth annual Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. King will receive $1,500 for her poem, “Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague,” which will appear in our Spring 2021 issue.
Of the winning poem, Kaminsky wrote, “This poem is able to bring together form and content in a way that’s spellbinding. An incantation of anaphoric repetition is used here to punctuate a journey, to accelerate it, to reveal its many implications.” The Georgia Review will host both Kaminsky and King for a reading this spring, if the coronavirus pandemic is sufficiently under control at that time to make it safe.
King is the winner of Narrative Magazine’s eleventh annual poetry contest and the winner of AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry, as well as New Millennium Writings’ forty-eighth New Millennium Award for Poetry. King’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Narrative Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, North American Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and Best New Poets, among others. She’s the recipient of a Tin House summer workshop scholarship and her first manuscript is a National Poetry Series finalist. She currently lives in rural California.
We would also like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Loraine Williams Poetry Prize opens in March 2021.
2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner & Finalists
Winner:
Hannah Perrin King, “Transcript of My Mother’s Sleeptalk: Chincoteague”
Finalists:
Taylor Bell, “Death of a Talisman”
Joshua Burton, “Elegy for Threats with Grace”
Imani Cezanne, “I found this poem in the kitchen”
Clare Chu, “Palimpsest”
Alexei Perry Cox, “My Homeland”
Chelsea DesAutels, “Maybe You Need to Write a Poem about Mercy”
Lupita Eyde-Tucker, “Guaranda”
Bernard Ferguson, “far past the beginning and quite close to the end,”
Diamond Forde, “Collard Greens and Ham Hocks, or What to Do When the Bill’s Due”
Caroline Goodwin, “228,057 Galium aparine Our Lady’s Bedstraw 04-30-20 0922 PD”
Sarah Gridley, “The Reeds”
Juan Luis Guzman, “Surrounded by Peach Trees in Bloom, President Clinton Speaks to My Fourth Grade Class”
David Landon, “Father’s Day: Looking West”
Daniel Lassell, “Edge markers”
Mihaela Moscaliuc, “Lovage”
Dean Rader, “Origin”
Serena Rodriguez, “mississippi waning”
Chivas Sandage, “summertime in america”
Darius Simpson, “Cain”
Arthur Solway, “Beckett’s Tree”
Betsy Tighe, “The St. Petersburg, FL, Cigar Factory Employs a Reader”
Ping Wang, “How a Droplet Becomes a Tsunami”
Michael Weinstein, “Drone Pastoral”
Shuyi Yin, “A Young Man Confronts the Nothing That Is”