Meg Day wins 2013 feminist chapbook contest
Gazing Grain Press is pleased to announce that judge Cathy Park Hong has selected Meg Day as the winner of our 2013 feminist chapbook contest! Her chapbook We Can't Read This will be published in September and launched at a celebratory reading during Fall for the Book on Sunday, September 22, at 4:30 p.m. at the Sherwood Center in Fairfax, VA.
We are also happy to announce that Cathy Park Hong has named Sandy Longhorn's manuscript The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths as runner-up.
Cathy Park Hong's comments on winner Meg Day's We Can't Read This:
"In a haunting collective voice that alternates between philosophic instruction to arresting confession, We Can’t Read This is a how-to on re-imagining the body and language when one is denied the instruments of voice and hearing. Through diagrams of sign language and spare fragmented lyrics, the series dramatizes the physical struggle of speech and movingly charts alternate modes of cognition. These poems are a personal and political rumination on disability as well as a beautiful and transformative exegesis on empathy."
Meg Day is a 2013 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, three-time Pushcart-nominated poet, nationally awarded spoken word artist, & veteran arts educator who is currently a PhD fellow in Poetry & Disability Poetics at the University of Utah. Meg hails from Oakland where she taught young poets to hold their own at the mic with YouthSpeaks & as a WritersCorps Teaching Artist in San Francisco. A 2010 Lambda Fellow, 2011 Hedgebrook Fellow, 2012 Squaw Valley Fellow, & 2012 AWP Intro Journals Award Winner, Meg’s most recent work can be found in or is forthcoming from RATTLE, Southern Humanities Review, Fugue, Troubling the Line: An Anthology of Trans & Genderqueer Poetry & Poetics, Flicker & Spark: An International Queer Poetry Anthology, This Assignment is So Gay: Poems from LGBTQ Teachers, The Atlas Review & in the chapbook, When All You Have is a Hammer, published in 2013 by Gertrude Press.
Sandy Longhorn is the author of Blood Almanac, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry. New poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hotel Amerika, North American Review, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches at Pulaski Technical College, where she directs the Big Rock Reading Series, and she teaches for the new low-residency MFA Program at the University of Arkansas Monticello. In addition, she co-edits the online journal Heron Tree, is an Arkansas Arts Council fellow, and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.
Finalists
Erin Costello, Tiny Brides Sarah Pieplow, golem.
Semi-finalists
Tyler Brewington, Dear Stray Volcano Renee D'Aoust, The Hound Cycle j/j hastain, Between Diaspora and Diapason Diane LeBlanc, Sudden Geography Nancy Wright, Acts of Balance
