The Ernest Sandeen Prize in Poetry is sponsored by the Creative Writing Program at University of Notre Dame in conjunction with The University of Notre Dame Press. Awarded to authors who have published at least one volume of poetry, winners receive publication and a prize of $1000 dollars.

The 2015 winner was published last month: Underdays by Martin Ott.

From the publisher’s website: “Underdays is a dialogue of opposing forces: life/death, love/war, the personal/the political. Ott combines global concerns with personal ones, in conversation between poems or within them, to find meaning in his search for what drives us to love and hate each other.”

Ott’s work can be found in The Antioch Review, The Café Review, and Epoch, just to name a few.

To learn more about Underdays, check out the University of Notre Dame Press’s website.

Look forward to Christine Poreba’s Rough Knowledge, winner of the 2014 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, currently scheduled to be published by Anhinga Press at the beginning of 2016. Rough Knowledge is Poreba’s first book and was chosen from nearly 700 manuscripts by Peter Everwine.

Everwine says of his selection:

[Poreba] has an eye for exact particulars and doesn’t stray from them, but her poems are so transparent, so quiet and intimate with the daily ambiguities and revelations of experience, that if you listen carefully you can almost believe the movement within her poems is like breathing: inward-containment, outward-space. I want such poetry close at hand.

To learn more about Rough Knowledge, check out Fresno State University’s website.

Halfway through November, Orison Books will release J. Scott Brownlee’s debut full-length poetry collection Requiem for Used Ignition Cap, winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize.

From the editors: The poems in this collection explore the rural landscape and residents of Brownlee’s native Llano, Texas. Brownlee might be considered a natural mystic, refusing to settle for the simplistic ideological framewo0rk offered by his religious heritage, but rather finding in the particulars of place the vehicles of transcendence.”

Brownlee has been awarded $1,500, along with publication. His poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, West Branch, and more.

Find out more at Orison Books’s website.

Winner of the 2014 Able Muse Book Award, Cause for Concern by Carrie Shipers is now available. From the publisher’s website: “Full of incisive meditations on frailties and fortitude often delivered with visceral honesty, Cause for Concern is spellbinding from start to finish.”

Order a print or digital copy of Cause for Concern from Able Muse’s website.

Since 1983, the University of Georgia Press has annualy held their Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, which, according to their website, “was established to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership.” Siamak Vossoughi’s winning collection Better Than War will be published in September 2015.

From the publisher’s description: “The stories in Better Than War encompass narratives from a diverse set of Iranian immigrants, many searching for a balance between memories of their homeland and their new American culture. [ . . . ] All Iranian immigrants, young or old, carry with them a vivid past in their contemporary life. Vossoughi’s Better Than War is about growing up, coming of age, and raising children in America while still remembering the importance of retaining Iranian pride.”

Preorder your copy of Better Than War at the University of Georgia Press website.

The Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize is awarded annually, with a first prize of $1,000 and publication. During this past May, the 2014 winner was published: No Map of the Earth Includes Stars by Christina Olivares.

Also the winner of YesYes Books’s 2014 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Competition with her chapbook Petition, Olivares has poems published or forthcoming in Five Quarterly, decomP, Vinyl Poetry, and PALABRA, among others.

Check out the Marsh Hawk Press website for more information about No Map of the Earth Includes Stars or pick up a copy.

The John Simmons Short Fiction Award is open to any writer who hasn’t previously published a volume of prose fiction. Charles Haverty is the 2015 winner with his forthcoming collection Excommunicados.

From the University of Iowa Press’s website: “By turns haunting, hilarious, and heartbreaking, Charles Haverty’s debut collection charts the journeys of men, women, and children cast out of familiar territory into emotional terra incognita where people and things are rarely what they seem. . . . There are secrets at the center of each of these daring and original stories—secrets that separate these characters from one another but grow in the mind and the heart, connecting them with all of us.”

To be available in October 2015, copies of Excommunicados can be preordered from the University of Iowa Press website.

The 2015 Iowa Short Fiction Award from the University of Iowa Press has been awarded to Edward Hamlin for his debut collection Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories.

Judge Karen Russell says of her selection, “The stories in Night in Erg Chebbi are sweeping and intimate and awesomely confident of their own effects. They document staggering, cataclysmic changes—forest fire, flash flood, revolution, murder—as well as the slow violence of grief and degenerative disease. [ . . . ] This is a collection with both depth and breadth, a book dedicated to revealing ‘the universal concealed in the weft of the particular.’ Hamlin spins the globe, jumping nimbly from a treetop lodge on a Brazilian riverbank to the lawn of a governor’s mansion on the eve of an execution to Merzouga, Morocco, ‘gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi.’ [ . . . ] Each story here is a world in miniature, illuminated by the flashbulb bursts of Hamlin’s luminous, controlled prose.”

Available in August, readers can preorder a copy of Night in Erg Chebbi and Other Stories on the University of Iowa Press website.

The Gival Press Poetry Award is held annually. Open to national and international poets, winners receive $1,000 and publication. The 2013 winner, We Deserve the Gods We Ask For by Seth Brady Tucker was published this past fall.

Judge Lisa Graley, winner of the previous year’s poetry award, says of her selection, “This is sinewy writing at its most sturdy and tenacious. His—tangle of silk and muscle—is sure to stagger and transfix.”

More information about the Gival Press Poetry Award and We Deserve the Gods We Ask For can be found at the Gival Press website.

The Slapering Hol Press Sanger-Stewart Chapbook Competition is open to writers who haven’t yet published a chapbook collection. Richard Parisio is the 2014 winner with his collection The Owl Invites Your Silence, released this year.

From the editors: “Parisio’s wise and moving words emerge from his training as a naturalist, teacher, journalist, and conservationist. This is a book of poems written by a poet who pays keen attention to the natural world that is quickly being destroyed. It is an important book for our time.”

Parisio has worked as an interpretive naturalist for 40 years and is a nature columnist for the local paper in New Paltz, NY. His work can be found in three regional anthologies, as well as The Kerf, Spillway, and Common Ground Review, among other journals.

The Word Works’s Tenth Gate Prize, “named in honor of Jane Hirshfield, recognizes the wisdom and dedication of mid- and late-career poets.”

Lisa Sewell was recognized in 2014 with her winning collection Impossible Object, selected by Series Editor Leslie McGrath for “its eloquence, originality, cohesion, and craft.”

Released in April, readers can pick up copies of Impossible Object from the publisher’s website or from SPD.

Winner of the 2014 First Book Competition from the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 50 Water Dreams by Siwar Masannat, selected by Ilya Kaminsky, is now available for purchase on the publisher’s website.

Of his selection, Kaminsky says, “How lucky we are to find a poetry debut that isn’t afraid of ideas, of mysteries, of politics, of passion. How brave she is to say ‘I saw nobody coming so I went instead.’ And to dare us: ‘I want to put you in my revolution.’ Like Zbigniew Herbert, this poet wants ‘to hide you in my eyelids & the nation,’ like Venus Khoury-Ghata, she makes a mythological pastoral, a book of voices that speak for more than one person.”

Masannat’s writing can also be found in New Orleans Review, Gargoyle, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other journals.

The Open Mouth of the Vase by Amy Ash, the winner of the 2013 Cider Press Review Book Award, was published in January.

“Pain, love, regret, joy, longing, loss, humor, and an earthy sexuality all find memorable expression in these poems. Ash has a gift for reversing reader expectations in illuminating ways, as well as for coining metaphors that startle with their aptness and their ability to refresh the world,” says judge Charles Harper Webb of his selection.

The Open Mouth of the Vase is Amy Ash’s first full-length collection. Pick up a copy or learn more at the Cider Press Review website.

Study for Necessity by JoEllen Kwiatek was released in April 2015. Winner of the 2014 Iowa Poetry Prize from University of Iowa Press, “Kwiatek’s poems emit the uncanny luminosities of the artists’ worlds they refer to: those of Caspar David Friedrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Odilon Redon. Each is a ‘token of strangeness’ built with delicacy and restraint, embodying, vivifying what the poet calls the mind’s ‘lonesome flourish.’ Like entries in a recondite log, or the etchings, or tracks, of a complex consciousness, this work cannot help but identify its own material and spiritual corollaries: a bridle worn to threadbare, a voyage that ‘grows more & more captivating. More terse.’ It is, as one poem puts it, as if seeing / were a form of radiant / isolation. And yet the presence established over the course of the book is profoundly connective, rich with acute physical apprehension and charge. It moves under pressure toward its singular end, its very ‘necessity,’” says judge Emily Wilson.

Read an excerpt of Study for Necessity or pick up at copy at the University of Iowa Press website.

The Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Poetry Competition’s 2014 winner has been released at the beginning of the month. Lee Upton’s Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles was selected by Erin Belieu. Of her selection, Belieu says, “This is without a doubt my new favorite book. Upton has long been a well-respected poet, prose writer, and literary critic, but she deserves much more popular attention, including yours.”

You can start by checking out Bottle the Bottles the Bottles the Bottles on the CSU website.

The Miller Williams Poetry Prize is annually held by the University of Arkansas Press. Each year, three finalists are announced with one winner of $5000 and publication.

George David Clark, with his first collection of poems Reveille, is the 2015 winner. Editor-in-Chief of 32 Poems Magazine, Clark has also earned the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship in Poetry and a Lily Postdoctoral Fellowship, among other honors.

Published this past February, Reveille, the publisher’s website says, “is rooted in awe and driven by the impulse to praise. At heart, these are love poems, though their loves are varied and complicated by terrible threats: that we will cry out and not be answered, fall asleep and never wake. Against such jeopardy Reveille fixes our attention on a lightening horizon.”

Readers can pick up a copy of this prize winner from the University of Arkansas Press website.

The Robert Dana-Anhinga Prize for Poetry began in 1983 and is open to poets for a manuscript of original poetry in English. Held annually, winners receive $2000 and a reading tour of Florida colleges and universities.

Robin Beth Schaer is the 2014 prize winner with her first book of poetry Shipbreaking. Her work has also appeared in Tin House, Bomb Magazine, Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, and Guernica, among others.

From Schaer’s website: “Shipbreaking charts a beautiful and dangerous journey. It is an intimate and interstellar odyssey where seas rise, mastodons roam, aeronauts float overhead, bodies electrify, and a child is born as a ship wrecks in a hurricane. The speaker here is curious and fierce, consulting scientists, philosophers, ancient maps, fossil bones, and lovers in order to survive and understand the strange majesty of living. With empathy and exaltation, the poems collapse the distance between natural disasters and human struggles, interweaving relationships between the upheavals and renewals that both the heart and Earth undergo.”

Shipbreaking will be published this August.

The Magic Laundry, by Jacob M. Appel won last year’s Serena McDonald Kennedy Prize from Snake~Nation~Press.

From the editors: “Jacob Appel’s fiction book, The Magic Laundry, is superbly written with that quirky quality that lets the reader know that somehow Mr. Appel has experienced something close to what he’s written about. Love of children and spouses and acquaintances in all their beauty and irrationality is depicted with an eye to what makes them lovable and yet hard to understand.”

To get your own copy of The Magic Laundry, check out the press’s website.

Trouble Sleeping by Abdul Ali, winner of the 2014 New Issues Prize, was published this past March.

From the foreword, written by Thomas Sayers Ellis: “Like a projection of testimony, like the shadows that run-off from the plan-projector-tation immediately after you’ve lived and left the theater, like the dark figures moving through the haunted noirs of Aaron Douglas, the widescreen stare of Trouble Sleeping is a mighty mise-en-concern.”

Ali’s poems have previously appeared in Gargoyle, A Gathering of Tribes, and New Contrast, among others. To learn more about Trouble Sleeping, check out the New Issues website.

Winner of The 2014 Green Rose Prize from New Issues, My Multiverse by Kathleen Halme was published last month. The Green Rose Prize is awarded to poets who already have published one or more full-length collections of poetry.

Of the new collection, poet John Brehm says, “In poems that are both intricate and expansive, Kathleen Halme’s My Multiverse takes readers from the City of Roses, with its Shanghai traps and tunnels, to a hummingbird ‘tracing the missing shape of a feed,’ to the neural pathways of the mind itself. These poems do what all great poems do: they make the world seem strange again, shimmering with questions, ‘the mirror ball of meaning strung without a thread.’”

In his debut collection, Matthew Siegel explores his body’s fight with Crohn’s Disease and the struggle to remain one’s self in the face of illness. Winner of the University of Wisconsin Press’s 2015 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, Blood Work was selected by Lucia Perillo. About her selection, Perillo states, “These poems resist the dualities of lyric versus narrative, confessional versus impersonal, real against surreal, formal/improvisational, comic/sad. Matthew Siegel manages to tick off all the boxes at once, while remaining compulsively readable. The trick that he’s pulled off is to make a book that simultaneously tickles you and shakes you by the scruff of your neck.”

Siegel’s writing has appeared in Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Tusculum Review, and Southern Humanities Review. Blood Work was released March 12, 2015.

Press 53 has awarded Rebecca Foust the winner of the 2015 Press 53 Award for Poetry with her collection Paradise Drive, chosen by Tom Lombardo. Of his selection, he says, “Rebecca Foust has created a Pilgrim who leads us from the hardscrabble existence and despair of Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she was raised, to the ultra-wealth and despair of Marin County, California, where she lived in the first decade of this century. The poems of Paradise Drive are powerful and figurative, with a very strong voice. Though the judging was close for this contest, Foust clearly stood out among the excellent finalists.”

Foust was also the recipient of the 2008 Many Mountain Press Poetry Book Prize for All that Gorgeous Pitiless Song, the winner of the 2010 Foreword Book of the Year Award with God, Seed: Poetry & Art About the Natural World, and the winner of Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook prizes in 2007 and 2008 with her two chapbooks Mom’s Canoe and Dark Card.

Paradise Drive will be released at the end of the month. For more information or to order a copy, check out the Press 53 website.

The Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize is awarded to one poetry author a year, with a $2,000 prize and publication. 2014’s prize winner is Jay Nebel whose work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, and Tin House, among other journals.

Neighbors, his winning collection, is a book of lyric narratives about the men and women who live and work next to us the people standing in line at the DMV or buying milk and bread at the grocery store. Jay Nebel gives voice to an America lost in the graffiti of park benches and 24-hour diner parking lots, where men attempt CPR on gorillas and beat each other in back alleys with baseball bats, as well as revere their mothers. These are poems that look through the windows at the secret lives of our neighbors, their affairs and addictions, their curses and loves.

Published by Saturnalia Books this month, Neighbors can be purchased through the University Press of New England website.

Robin McLean’s first short story collection, Reptile House, will be published May, 2015 by BOA Editions, Ltd. A finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Story Prize in 2011 and 2012, Reptile House is the winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize.

The fascinating characters in these nine short stories abandon families, plot assassinations, nurse vendettas, tease, taunt, and terrorize. They retaliate for bad marriages, derail their lives with desires and delusions, and wait decades for lovers. How far will we go to escape to a better dream? What consequences must we face for hope and fantasy? Probing the dark underbelly of human nature and want, Robin McClean’s stories are strange, often disturbing and funny, and as full of foolishness and ugliness as they are of the wisdom and beauty around us.

Living in Alaskan woods for 15 years as a potter and lawyer, McLean, in an interview with BOA, reveals how Alaska has affected her writing, “Alaska is wild, dangerous, beauitiful, and makes you feel tiny. Living there made me want to write with wild dangerous beauty, to be small, and also big . . . . Alaska made me think about scale, grandeur, and audacity.”

More information on Reptile House can be found on the publisher’s website.

Devin Becker’s debut collection Shame | Shame investigates two types of shame: that which disgraces, and that which curbs and keeps. Set in the mundane everyday where lives maneuver around other lives, conversations are clumsy, and a co-worker is the only one without a party invite, these confessional narrative poems humorously dramatize the socially awkward moments of life.

Shame | Shame is the 2014 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize winner, selected by David St. John, who also provides a foreword for the collection, stating “We all want to know what happened to Huck after he decided to ‘light out for the Territory’—my own sense is that 150 years later, a little sadder and a whole lot wiser, he emerged as Devin Becker.”

Published by BOA Editions, Ltd., Shame | Shame will be released this April.

The poems in The Belle Mar by Katie Bickham are set on a Louisiana plantation from 1811 through 2005, and speak through the imagined voices of slaves, masters, mistresses, servants, and children. Focused on events that take place in a single room within the plantation home, Belle Mar, Bickham offers an unflinching portrayal of the atrocities that form an undeniable part of Lousiana’s history. The fully rounded characters she evokes allow readers to contemplate the social forces that shaped a slave-holding society and perpetuated injustices long after abolition.

Katie Bickham has also received the Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize from The Missouri Review. Her work can be found in Pleiades and Prairie Schooner. Winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, chosen by Alicia Ostriker, The Belle Mar will be released by Pleiades Press on April 14, 2015.

Black Lawrence Press runs their Black River Chapbook Competition biannually (submissions opening again this spring), seeking an unpublished poetry or short fiction chapbook. Winners receive publication, $500, and ten copies of their perfect-bound book.

Fall 2013’s winning title A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us by Caleb Curtiss was published this past February.

“A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us is an elegant chronicle of grief, of the sprawling bonds between brothers and sisters, of bodies in this world, of the power of language when so artfully arranged. Caleb Curtiss is a poet among poets and in this beautiful and assured collection, he makes himself heard and how.” —Roxane Gay, author of An Untamed State & Bad Feminist

Curtiss’s work can also be found in The Literary Review, New England Review, PANK, Hayden’s Ferry Review, DIAGRAM, Passages North, Spork, and TriQuarterly, and in New Poetry From The Midwest, published by New American Press.

Free Verse Editions, the poetry series of Parlor Press, hosts The New Measure Poetry Prize each year, awarding a prize of $1,000 and publication to an author of an original, unpublished manuscript of poems. Chosen by Carolyn Forché as the 2013 winner, No Shape Bends the River So Long by Monica Berlin and Beth Marzoni was published this past December.

“[. . .] together they navigate with beauty and resonance the ‘hours of drought, of waiting, the new low- / watermarks of the lakes,’ the trees ‘that sound like rain & morning.’ This is ecopoetry, it is intimate conversation, it is meditation, the turning inward, the swinging back out from mind to world around the bend.” –Nancy Eimers

Check out Free Verse’s website to learn more about No Shape Bends the River So Long.

Michael Bazzett, winner of the Milkweed Editions 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, will have his collection of poems, You Must Remember This, published in November 2014. Pre-orders at a reduced price are being taken now on the Milkweed website. Bazzett will be reading at the Minneapolis Central Library on November 11 at 7:00 pm.