Contest Winners
Poetry Book Prize Winner
The Vital Function of Constant Narrative
by Marlys West
Expected Release Date – July 2021
Poetry Book Prize Finalist
The Lost Books of Bestiary
by Chapman Hood Frazier
Expected Release Date – July 2021
Compilation Book Prize Winner
Released September 2020
Marlys West
Winner of the $700 Poetry Book Prize for The Vital Function of Constant Narrative
Whatever flows from you, you are: black bird, old dog, white cat. This new cup.
This line from the opening poem in Marlys West’s The Vital Function of Constant Narrative suggests elegantly the main thread that runs throughout the collection: here is no barrier between past, present, and future; this and other worldly; the living and the dead. All that has ever been or ever will be—plant, mineral, or animal—are vital parts of the ongoing narrative of both the conscious and the unconscious. West’s award winning book is a stunning collection of lyrical, wise, and haunting reminders of the connected, sacred nature of all things.
— Cathy Smith Bowers, Guest Editor and Former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
Chapman Hood Frazier
Finalist with Publication and $300 Monetary Award – Poetry Book Prize
Chapman Hood Frazier’s The Lost Books of the Bestiary is both requiem and elegy. The arrangement of the poems is evolutionary in nature, an exploration of a natural world that continues to teach us one of life’s greatest paradoxes: that only in loss do we truly understand the essence of that which is now gone. Frazier’s collection instructs us how to celebrate life even as it is passing from us, to realize that the stone by the tomb’s door…[is] a luminescence.
— Cathy Smith Bowers, Guest Editor and Former Poet Laureate of North Carolina
