The University of Wisconsin Press is proud to publish at least seven poetry collections each year as part of the Wisconsin Poetry Series. In celebration of National Poetry Month, all in-stock Wisconsin Poetry Series titles are on sale for 30% off with discount code NPM2024UWISC. We invite you to browse the Wisconsin Poetry Series titles and learn more about the series at this link. You can also follow along on social media as we highlight many must-read collections throughout the month!
The Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry, along with the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, are awarded annually; each winner receives a monetary prize and publication of their work in the Wisconsin Poetry Series. Winners are selected by a guest judge following an initial screening process conducted by coeditors Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval in conjunction with the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The series also publishes collections by a handful of exceptional finalists and, often, a winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry. The next submissions period will open this summer.
Out of nearly 1,000 entrants, Caitlin Roach has been selected as the winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and Eduardo Martínez-Leyva has been named the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Additionally, Peter Covino has been selected as the winner of the second annual Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation, for his translation of Dario Bellezza’s work. Each will receive $1,500, and their collections will be published this fall by the University of Wisconsin Press.
In addition, Emily Bludworth de Barrios has been named winner of the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry, and her collection will be published next spring, alongside finalist collections by Hedgie Choi, Caroline M. Mar, and Felicia Zamora.
Amaud Jamaul Johnsonserved as this year’s judge for the Brittingham and Felix Pollak prizes. Born and raised in Compton, California, he is the author of three poetry collections, Red Summer, Darktown Follies, and Imperial Liquor. He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, MacDowell Fellow, and Cave Canem Fellow, and his honors include the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Dorset Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Lit Hub, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He is currently the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University. His most recent collection, Imperial Liquor, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2021 UNT Rilke Prize.
Geoffrey Brock served as the judge for this year’s Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. He is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of various books of poetry, prose, and comics, most recently Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria, which received ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry. His other awards include the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, the MLA Lois Roth Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Prize, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches in the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing & Translation, where he is the founding editor of the Arkansas International.
Caitlin Roach’s collection, Surveille, has been awarded the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. Roach is a queer poet from Southern California. A three-time National Poetry Series finalist, her poems have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Tin House, jubilat, The Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, Colorado Review, and Best New Poets (2023, 2021, and 2017), among others. She earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and their two sons.
Eduardo Martínez-Leyva’scollection,Cowboy Park, has been awarded the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Martínez-Leyvawas born in El Paso, Texas, to Mexican immigrants. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Boston Review, The Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, the Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation, along with a teaching fellowship from Columbia University, where he earned his MFA. He was the writer-in-residence at St. Alban’s School for Boys in Washington, DC, and teaches and resides in New York City.
Peter Covino’s translation of What Sex Is Death: Selected Poems of Dario Bellezza has been awarded the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. Covino’s translation work has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Richmond American International University of London, Rome Programme. After a fourteen-year career as a social worker in the fields of AIDS services and foster care, Covino is an associate professor of English in the PhD Program at the University of Rhode Island, specializing in contemporary poetry, translation, and ethnic studies. He is also a well-published scholar, poet, editor, and author, with works that include a coedited essay collection on Italian American literature and the prize-winning poetry books The Right Place to Jump and Cut Off the Ears of Winter (2007 PEN-American Osterweil Award). Covino is the founding editor and faculty advisor of the Ocean State Review, and since 1998 a founding editor-trustee of the nonprofit press Barrow Street Inc.
Dario Bellezza (1944–96) was Italy’s first openly gay, major prize-winning poet-novelist-playwright, who died a premature death of AIDS-related complications. Over the course of a twenty-five-year career, he publishedmore than twenty books, including eight full-length poetry collections, eight novels, two plays, translations from the French, and nonfiction. Twentieth-century Italian and American literary luminaries Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Gregory Corso, and Allen Ginsberg, among others, championed his work. Significantly, Bellezza’s literary career extends two decades beyond Pasolini’s death, and he embraced his identity as an out gay man in an era of increased polemicizing of gay rights and harsh opposition by the Vatican. The sheer variety of forms, from epigram to brash love-lyric to sustained political narrative, coupled with the fervor of Bellezza’s voice make a compelling argument for his lasting importance among the best poets of the second half of the twentieth century.
Emily Bludworth de Barrios’s collection Rich Wife has been awarded the Four Lakes Prize in Poetry. Bludworth de Barriosis a poet whose previous book,Shopping, or The End of Time, received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in publications such as Harvard Review, Copper Nickel, The Poetry Review, and Oxford Poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and also holds degrees from Goldsmiths College and the College of William & Mary. She was raised in Houston, Cairo, and Caracas, and now lives in both Houston, Texas, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia.
Hedgie Choi, author of the collection Salvage, received her MFA in poetry from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin and her MFA in fiction from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry can be found in Poetry, Catapult, West Branch, and elsewhere. Her fiction can be found in Noon, American Short Fiction, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She cotranslated Hysteria by Kim Yideum, which won the 2020 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize and the 2020 National Translation Award. Her translation of Pillar of Books by Moon Bo Young was published by Black Ocean in 2021.
Caroline M. Mar, author of the collection Water Guest, is the great-granddaughter of a railroad laborer and the author of Special Education and the chapbook Dream of the Lake. A high school health educator in her hometown of San Francisco, she is getting to know her new home of Oakland. Mar is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, an alumna of VONA, and a member of Rabble Collective. She has been granted residencies at Storyknife, Ragdale, and Hedgebrook, among others.
Felicia Zamora’s collection Interstitial Archaeology will be released next spring. Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient; I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner; and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner. She won the 2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize from The Georgia Review, a 2022 Tin House Next Book Residency, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Guernica, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and others. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and a poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
Submissions for the next competition will be accepted between July 15 and September 15, 2024.
About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With more than 1,500 titles and 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.
The Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry and the Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation are now open for submissions! Please apply by September 15. Our $1,500 prizes for original poetry collections in English will be judged by Amaud Jamaul Johnson this year, and our translation prize will be judged by Geoffrey Brock. More details about this year’s judges and our manuscript requirements can be found below. Winners will be chosen by February 15, 2024, and will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press the following fall. Up to four other finalists may also be selected by the series editors to be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the spring of 2025.
The Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry
The Brittingham and Pollak Prizes are open to any book-length poetry manuscript in English that has not yet been published as a full collection. Before visiting our Submittable page (click here), please assemble a single pdf, including a title page, a table of contents, your poems, and (optionally) an acknowledgments page listing any magazines or journals where the submitted poems may have first appeared. Your name and contact info should not appear anywhere in the document or in the pdf file name. Manuscripts should be fifty to ninety pages in length on 8.5″ x 11″ pdf pages.
Simultaneous submissions are permitted, as long as the author agrees to withdraw the manuscript through Submittable if it is accepted elsewhere. If you have any questions, please first consult our FAQ. If you don’t find your answer, query series editors Sean Bishop and Jesse Lee Kercheval at poetryseries@english.wisc.edu.
The Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation
Translators or original authors are invited to submit a book-length manuscript, including all poems in both their original language and their English translation, for the second annual Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. The translations submitted must be previously unpublished in book form. Simultaneous submissions are permitted, as long as the applicant withdraws the manuscript if it is accepted elsewhere. The winning manuscript will be awarded $1,500 and will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in the fall of 2024, alongside the winners of our annual Brittingham & Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. Submissions will remain open until September 15, 2023, through Submittable (click here).
Applicants are asked to confirm they hold the rights to their translations, including any necessary permissions from the original publisher or poet for publication, before preparing a manuscript in pdf format, including the following:
A simple title page, which should include the names of the original author(s) and translator(s).
A table of contents, with accurate page numbers indicated.
75 to 150 pages of poetry, including all poems in both their original language and translated into English, with numbered pages.
A biography page, including 50- to 250-word bios for each author and translator.
A project description that addresses the book’s historical, cultural, and/or artistic significance.
An acknowledgments page (optional, if any translations are previously published).
About This Year’s Judges
Amaud Jamaul Johnson will judge the Brittingham and Felix Pollak Prizes in Poetry. Born and raised in Compton, California, he is the author of three poetry collections, Red Summer (2006), Darktown Follies (2013), and Imperial Liquor (2020). He is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford, MacDowell Fellow, and Cave Canem Fellow, and his honors include the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Dorset Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, the New York Times Magazine, Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Lit Hub, Narrative Magazine, Crazyhorse, Indiana Review, the Southern Review, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. He is currently the Knight Family Professor of Creative Writing at Stanford University. Previously, he served as the Halls Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Arthur M. and Fanny M. Dole Professor of English at Pomona College. His most recent collection, Imperial Liquor, was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2021 UNT Rilke Prize.
Geoffrey Brock will judge this year’s Wisconsin Prize for Poetry in Translation. He is the author of three books of poems, the editor of The FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry, and the translator of various books of poetry, prose, and comics, most recently Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Allegria, which received ALTA’s National Translation Award for Poetry. His other awards include the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, the MLA Lois Roth Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Prize, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets. He teaches in the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing & Translation, where he is the founding editor of the Arkansas International.
About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With more than 1,500 titles and 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.
Out of more than 850 entrants, Tacey M. Atsitty has been selected as the winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and Michael Dhyne has been named the winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Each will receive $1,500, and their collections will be published this fall by the University of Wisconsin Press. In addition, Nick Lantz has been named winner of the Four Lakes Poetry Prize, and his collection will be published next spring. The University of Wisconsin Press will also publish finalist collections by Daniel Khalastchi, Lisa Fay Coutley, and Saúl Hernández next spring.
Eduardo C. Corral served as this year’s contest judge. Corral is the author of Guillotine, longlisted for the National Book Award, and Slow Lightning, which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. He’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.
Tacey M. Atsitty, Diné (Navajo), is Tsénahabiłnii (Sleep Rock People) and born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle People). The recipient of numerous prizes and fellowships, Atsitty is an inaugural Indigenous Nations Poets fellow and holds degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute of American Indian Arts as well as an MFA from Cornell University. The author of Rain Scald (University of New Mexico Press), Atsitty has also published work in POETRY, EPOCH, Kenyon Review Online, Poem-A-Day: Academy of American Poets, The Hopkins Review, Shenandoan, High Country News, Hairstreak Butterfly Review, Literature and Belief, Leavings, and other publications. She is the director of the Navajo Film Festival, a member of the Advisory Board for BYU’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, and a board member for Lightscatter Press. Atsitty is a PhD student in creative writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she lives with her husband.
About the Brittingham-winning volume, James Kimbrell, author of Smote, says, “As formally seductive as it is subversive, Tacey Atsitty’s (AT) Wrist is a poetry of deep longing and praise, of loss and the courage of resilience. Anchored in an intimate vision of connectedness, her syntax works its way beyond thought’s limit, setting its hook in the terrain of memory and dream. This is a book I will return to for what no other poet I know delivers with such daring and vulnerability, a poetry wherein time, body, and the natural world are presented as a singularity otherwise known as love.”
Michael Dhyne, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize, was born and raised in California. He received an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was awarded the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Spectacle, and elsewhere. His work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. He lives in Oakland and is pursuing a master’s degree in social welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. Afterlife is his first book.
About the Felix Pollak–winning volume, Debra Nystrom says, “Michael Dhyne’s Afterlife is heartbreaking and brilliant in its delicacy and its depths, and in the many ways it reaches from interior drama to range far out into the wider world. These poems carry the powerful and particular effects of a singular experience of early loss, even while they look intently at the changes that follow, and the possibilities they contain for understanding how to continue forward. The spell cast by this book ties our adult ways of moving through our lives to the primitive child-need for magic and reassurance: the longing we all know for order amid the terrors of random events, and the search, in the welter of our days, for the place or person or state of mind in which self can feel held.”
Nick Lantz is the author of four previous books of poetry, including You, Beast (winner of the Brittingham Prize) and The Lightning That Strikes the Neighbors’ House (winner of the Felix Pollak Prize). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, the Gettysburg Review, the Southern Review, and other journals, as well as in the Best American Poetry anthology. His poetry has received several awards, including the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writer Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches in the MFA program at Sam Houston State University and lives in Huntsville, Texas, with his wife and cats.
Lantz’s earlier work has been reviewed in venues like NPR and Booklist. About a previous volume, Tess Taylor said on NPR’s All Things Considered, “Lantz has a knack for turning the battered material of daily life into something off-kilter, newly felt.” About another volume, Judith Kitchen wrote in the Georgia Review, “Lantz kindles his own imagination, luxuriates in speculative reverie, and indulges in rhetorical maneuvers that are openly innovative. . . . Again and again Lantz’s poems make moves that surprise, and illuminate.”
Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is the author of three previous books of poetry—Manoleria (Tupelo Press), Tradition (McSweeney’s), and American Parables (University of Wisconsin Press, winner of the Brittingham Prize). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including American Poetry Review, The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, Granta, The Iowa Review, the Jewish Book Council’s Paper Brigade, and Best American Experimental Writing. A recent visiting assistant professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he currently lives in Iowa City, where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing. He is the cofounder and managing editor of Rescue Press. The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is his fourth book.
“Like a new angel of history, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival arrives with its wings heavy with live fish and doorknobs, shovels and bone cake, faith and desire. Khalastchi has turned the poem into a long, beautiful wail, soft and brilliant enough for even Babel and Kafka and Singer to hear. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out Khalastchi feeds each poem by hand, and brushes nightly their wings. With as much abandon as with hope, these poems sway on the edge of a miracle,” says Sabrina Orah Mark.
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of tether (Black Lawrence Press); Errata (Southern Illinois University Press), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition; In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition; and Small Girl: Micromemoirs (Harbor Editions); and the editor of the grief anthology In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy (Black Lawrence Press). She is the recipient of an NEA Literature Fellowship; an Academy of American Poets Larry Levis Memorial Poetry Prize, chosen by Dana Levin; and a Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, selected by Natalie Diaz. Recent prose and poetry appears in Barrelhouse, Brevity, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, and North American Review. She is an associate professor of poetry and creative nonfiction in the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the chapbook series editor at Black Lawrence Press.
Trey Moody says, “Part elegy to the Anthropocene, part case study of internet-era loneliness, the metaphorical relationships woven throughout HOST’s poignant, timely, and necessary poems are many: mother host to son, woman host to patriarchy, flower host to human pleasure, earth host to people’s waste. Among these layered threats to the body and the planet, there’s a plea for repair, for reclamation, as one speaker asks, ‘did you hear me / agree to be an island?’ Here we have a poet at the height of her craft, skillfully rendering the essential dispatches we all need to hear.”
Saúl Hernández is a queer writer from San Antonio, Texas, who was raised by undocumented parents. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. He’s the winner of a Pleiades Prufer Poetry Prize, judged by Joy Priest; and a Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize, chosen by Victoria Chang. His poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Hernández’s work is forthcoming or featured in Pleiades, Frontier Poetry, Poet Lore, Foglifter Journal, Oyster River Pages, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere.
“In How to Kill a Goat & Other Monsters, Saúl Hernández stitches together torn scraps of myth and faith, displacement and violence, love and the queer body into a rich quilt, a gorgeous poetic coming-of-age story that is both universal and his alone. This is a moving and special book, one to read, to gift to friends, to reread,” says Jesse Lee Kercheval, coeditor of the Wisconsin Poetry Series and author of I Want To Tell You.
Submissions for the next competition will be accepted between July 15 and September 15, 2023.
About the University of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press is a not-for-profit publisher of books and journals. With nearly 1,500 titles and over 8,000 peer-reviewed articles in print, its mission embodies the Wisconsin Idea by publishing work of distinction that serves the people of Wisconsin and the world.
