POL Prizes

Congratulations to the winners of this year's POL Prizes:


Gray Matter, by Sara Michas-Martin
Winner of the POL Prize, selected by Susan Wheeler

Sara Michas-Martin is a writer, artist and teacher. She earned a BFA in visual arts from the University of Michigan and an MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. She has also studied at Naropa University and Scuola Leonardo Da Vinci in Florence, Italy. She currently lives in Denver and teaches creative writing and interdisciplinary studies for Stanford’s Online Writers’ Studio and Goddard College in Vermont. Her awards include a Wallace Stegner fellowship and Jones lectureship from Stanford, as well as three Pushcart Prize nominations.




Errings, by Peter Streckfus
Winner of the POL Editor's Prize

Peter Streckfus’s debut collection, The Cuckoo (2004), was selected by Louise Glück for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He is the recipient a 2013 Rome Prize Fellowship in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Additional honors include fellowships from the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference and the Peter S. Reed Foundation. Born in San Antonio, Streckfus earned a BA from the University of Texas-Austin and an MFA from George Mason University. He is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama.




Finalists (in random order):

• Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World, by Kathryn Cowles
• The Sense Series, by Sally Van Doren
• The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, by Maggie Smith
• Tidal, by Josh Kalscheur
• A Turkish Dictionary, by Andrew Wessels
• Day cracks between the bones of the foot, by Jesse Nissim
• ATM, by Chris Salerno
• Giraffes of Devotion, by Sarah Mangold
• Cyclorama, by Daneen Wardrop

Since 1999, Poets Out Loud has sponsored an annual competition for a full-length poetry manuscript, published each spring by Fordham University Press. Since 2010 the series has expanded to include an Editor's Prize. Both prizes award $1,000, publication by Fordham University Press, and a reading with the final judge in the POL series at Fordham's Lincoln Center Campus.

Books can be ordered through the Fordham University Press.


POL PRIZE WINNERS AMY SARA CARROLL & NICOLAS HUNDLEY READ WITH EVIE SHOCKLEY AT THEIR BOOK LAUNCH IN THE POL READING SERIES, MARCH 26, 2013

2013-2014 POL Prizes Deadline: November 8, 2013