Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren has won the 2014 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, which is awarded annually to the best poet appearing in MQR who has not yet published a book. The award, which is determined by the MQR editors, is in the amount of $500.
MQR Poetry Editor Keith Taylor writes that her poem “The Astronaut 512 Miles from the Earth,” which appeared in our Summer 2014 issue, does “a lovely job recreating the image of light seen from space, how it occurs all around the planet in weird and unexpected ways, and then the light becomes a metaphor. She connects that light both with the act of writing about it and with the body of the beloved. It becomes a very ambitious short poem, a genuine accomplishment.”
The Page Davidson Clayton Prize was established in 2009 by a generous gift from Meg and Mac Clayton in honor of Mac Clayton’s mother and in support of poetry and the development of new poets.
Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren is a poet and translator based in Rio de Janeiro. Her work has been honored with a Fulbright Fellowship, a Hopwood Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize, appearing in literary journals such as Narrative, BOMB, Guernica, The Common, and Passages North. She holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MFA from Columbia University.
