Rosa Lane Wins 2017 Georgia Poetry Prize

Photo/Marilea C. Tanner-Linne

The University of Georgia Press is pleased to announce Rosa Lane as winner of the 2017 Georgia Poetry Prize. In partnership with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, and the University of Georgia, the University of Georgia Press established the Georgia Poetry Prize in 2015 as a national competition that celebrates excellence in poetry.

The winner of the annual contest receives a cash award of $1,000, a publication contract with the University of Georgia Press, and invitations to read excerpts from the work at the three sponsoring institutions. The prize was established through the generous support of the Georgia and Bruce McEver Fund for the Arts and Environment at the University of Georgia Press. Lane’s collection Chouteau’s Chalk will be published by the University of Georgia Press in February 2019.

Rosa Lane is the author of Tiller North (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2016), winner of a 2017 National Indie Excellence Award and 2017 Maine Literary Award for a five-poem excerpt. She is also author of Roots and Reckonings (Granite Press, East, 1980), a chapbook, published with a grant from the Maine Arts Commission. Lane received her MFA in creative writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a second master’s and PhD in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Cutthroat, Folio, New South, Nimrod, Ploughshares, RHINO Poetry, Tishman Review, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. As a poet and architect, she splits her time between coastal Maine and the San Francisco Bay Area, where she lives with her wife.

This year’s judge, Magdalena Zurawski, says of the collection: “The lush sounds of the poems in Rosa Lane’s Chouteau’s Chalk make even the silent reader’s ears prick up. Her words wind us feverishly through landscapes of initiation, those early erotic encounters so impressed upon our being that we can only look back and say ‘hello, me.’ The spaces here are sometimes wounding, ‘outlined in neon, a noble gas, atomic, orange,’ or ‘a blur, a fallen entity / inside the house,’ but like all freedom songs, they map the road taken. Here that road is queerly, wildly, sweetly taken, ‘zipping us all the way down the beck.’”

Zurawski is the author of a poetry collection, Companion Animal (Litmus Press, 2015), and a novel, The Bruise (Fiction Collective, 2008). She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at the University of Georgia. She holds a BA in comparative literature from Brown University and completed her PhD in American literature at Duke University in 2013.

This year’s runner-up is Samuel Amadon for Tourism.

The finalists are Tony Mancus of Lakewood, Colorado; Jonathan Weinert of Harvard, Massachusetts; Richard Brostoff of Belmont, Massachusetts; Hannah Gamble of Chicago, Illinois; Melissa Ginsburg of Oxford, Mississippi; Christopher Citro of Camillus, New York; Kimberly Andrews of Chestertown, Maryland; and Stan Mir of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Interested parties for next year’s prize may consult the guidelines and submit their manuscripts online through Submittable between October 1 and November 30, 2018.