Michigan Quarterly Review has awarded this year’s trio of literary prizes:
Lawrence Foundation Prize
Cody Peace Adams has won the $1000 Lawrence Foundation Prize for 2013. The prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of MQR to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. Adams’s story “Victory Chimes” appeared in the Winter 2013 issue.
“Victory Chimes” brings us into the brittle, bitter, and entirely too clever mind of a young man trying to put his life back together after a catastrophic automobile accident.
Adams is the thirty-sixth winner of the prize, joining, among other authors, Charles Baxter, Paul Bowles, Susan Dodd, Clark Blaise, Sena Jeter Naslund, Rebecca Makkai, Alice Mattison, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The prize is endowed by the Lawrence Foundation and its director, Leonard S. Bernstein, an alumnus of the University of Michigan and himself a fiction writer.
He is a native of Salem, Oregon, and labors as a freelance educational design consultant and resume preparer. His work includes short fiction in Michigan Quarterly Review and New Orleans Review, as well as a travel column for Electric Literature in the fall of 2013.
Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize
Benjamin Busch has won the 2013 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of the best poem or group of poems appearing that year in the Michigan Quarterly Review. His poem “Girls,” which is based on his experience as a Marine in Iraq, appeared in the Winter 2013 issue.
Speaking of “Girls,” Edward Hirsch, who was this year’s judge, writes:
“I love the dramatic situation in ‘Girls,’ its complex psychology and deep self-consciousness, the way the poem establishes and characterizes the odd relationship (or non-relationship) between the invasive soldiers and the women and girls who warily go about their business, watching them. It is a splendid poem that takes place in ‘no man’s land.’”
The Laurence Goldstein Prize was established in 2002 by a generous gift from the Office of the President of the University of Michigan and is awarded in the amount of $500. A different judge is selected each year by the university.
Busch served sixteen years as an infantry and light armored reconnaissance officer in the United States Marine Corps, deploying to Iraq in 2003 and 2005. He is the author of a memoir, Dust to Dust (Ecco/HarperCollins), and has published in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and North American Review, among others.
Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets
Anne Barngrover is the fifth recipient of the 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 “Memory, 1999” is “a fantastic poem, full of movement, sharp imagery, and a certain delicacy.”
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.
Barngrover earned her MFA at Florida State and is a current PhD candidate at the University of Missouri. Her first book, Yell Hound Blues, is forthcoming by Shipwreckt Books, and her chapbook, Candy in Our Brains, cowritten with poet Avni Vyas, is forthcoming from CutBank Press later in 2014. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Indiana Review, Witness, and Ninth Letter, among others.
These awards are not part of a contest. Only works published in the Michigan Quarterly Review are eligible, and all works published in the relevant categories are automatically considered for the awards. Click here for our submission guidelines.
