Miller Williams Poetry Prize – serie

The men who recur as characters throughout Jess Williard’s Unmanly Grief perform their masculinity in a variety of ways: boxing, theater, brotherhood, labor, and familial and romantic love. Marked by a sharp nostalgia, Williard’s poems move from Wisconsin to New York City and back, tracing the geographic movement of the speaker and his family: a teenage sister who disappears and returns, changed irrevocably; an older brother dismantled in adulthood; an ever-sacrificing father. Woven through the musculature of this varied and exciting collection, music appears as readily in dexterous formal verse as in lean, scrappy storytelling. What results is a crooning celebration of struggle and tenderness in this world, “where to be small and furious is enough.”

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeIn the same way that the speaker in these poems often seems itinerant, lacking a place or person to call home, the poems themselves have their own roaming quality. The reader is moved somewhere unexpected, the poems seem to shapeshift or suddenly beckon from somewhere else, or they may zoom into focus. Like a succession of Russian dolls, the poems open toward and magnify the concealed, removed, or forgotten. Throughout, whether from cosmic or microscopic perspective, the details here are handled tenderly, and these poems, even with their constant sense of mobility, return to and are anchored by the familiarly human.

Winner, 2021 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeMichael McGriff’s Eternal Sentences bears witness to the world of gravel roads, working-class families, and geographic isolation in poems that illuminate both common occurrence and the territories of the surreal. Here, in rendering every line as a single sentence, McGriff depicts a world seen through fragments, quick leaps, and wild associations. Haunted as much by place and people, landscapes and distant figures, as by the possibilities of image-making itself, Eternal Sentences is a song for the hidden depots of rural America.

Winner, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeJ. Bailey Hutchinson’s Gut is the dazzling debut of a born storyteller. In Hutchinson’s poems, which explore the substance of personal history, family attains the mysterious stature of folklore, while the vast worlds of nature and of the imagination abound with extraordinary creatures that likewise elude full understanding. For the voracious consciousness at work here, inheritance—what it means to be from a particular place and a particular people, no matter how one might strain against that—lies at the very heart of things.

Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeFrom cities and cross-country bus rides to swamps and fern forests, Michael Mlekoday’s All Earthly Bodies celebrates the ungentrifiable, ungovernable wildness of life. This is anarchist ecology, nonbinary environmentalism, an earthbound theology against empire in all its forms. These poems ask how our lives and language, our prayers and politics, might evolve if we really listened to the world and its more-than-human songs.“Sometimes I wish I could / peel myself from myself / without discarding the shell,” Mlekoday writes. Through a kind of lyric dreamwork, Mlekoday sounds the depths—of ancestry and identity, race and gender, earth and self—to track the unbecoming and re-membering of the body.

Finalist, 2022 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeIn a voice at times electrified by caustic cynicism, at other times stripped bare by grief, Casey Thayer’s Rational Anthem offers wry tribute to “the greatest country God could craft with the mules he had / on hand.” In seeking to tell the story of the ragged world around him, Thayer examines the links among flag-waving populism, religious fervor, and toxic masculinity. Here male intimacy—among childhood friends, between father and son, and in the tenuous bonds between young adults—generally finds acceptance only when expressed through a shared passion for guns and hunting: “I helped my father clean his hands with field grass, / convinced we had shared a moment / in rolling the internal organs out of the abdomen.”In “How-To,” the book’s closer—a mash-up of instructions from active-shooter trainings attended by the poet—Thayer grasps at strategies for surviving a world where we have come to see school shootings as routine: “Grab a textbook, they instructed my child, and hug it to your chest over your heart.”Formally deft and lyrically dense, Rational Anthem asks why we find it so hard to change the stories we keep repeating.

To Be Named Something Else, winner of the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, is a high-spirited celebration of Black matriarchy and lineage—both familial and literary. Centering the coming-of-age of Black femmes in Harlem, Shaina Phenix’s debut collection, in the words of series judge Patricia Smith: “enlivens the everyday—the everyday miraculous, the everyday hallelujah, the numbing everyday love, the everyday risk of just being Black and living. There is absolutely nowhere these poems aren’t—we’re dancing and sweating through our clothes, terminating a pregnancy in a chilled room of white and silver, finally gettin’ those brows threaded and nails did, practicing gettin’ the Holy Ghost, sending folks to their rest, having babies, listening carefully to the lessons of elders, and sometimes even talking back. . . . To Be Named Something Else is a book of reason and reckoning, substance and shadow. It’s tender and wide-aloud and just about everything we need right now, when both reason and reckoning are in such woefully short supply.” Phenix’s full-throated poetry, with its “superlative combination of formalism and funk,” is assuredly something else.

In Jessica Poli’s Red Ocher, the wild mortality of the natural world merges with melancholic expressions of romantic loss: a lamb runt dies in the night, a first-time lover inflicts casual cruelties, brussels sprouts rot in a field, love goes quietly and unbearably unrequited. This is an ecopoetics that explores the cyclical natures of love and grief, mindful that “there will be room for desire / again, even after it leaves / like a flood receding, / the damaged farmhouses / and washed-away bridges / lying scattered the next day / amid silt and debris.” Throughout, Poli’s poems hold space for the sacred—finding it in woods overgrown with thorny weeds, in drunken joy rides down rural roads, and in the red ocher barns that haunt the author’s physical and emotional landscapes.

The Daughter of Man follows its unorthodox heroine as she transforms from maiden to warrior—then to queen, maven, and crone—against the backdrop of suburban America from the 1980s to today. In this bold reframing of the hero’s journey, L. J. Sysko serves up biting social commentary and humorous, unsparing self-critique while enlisting an eccentric cast that includes Betsy Ross as sex worker, Dolly Parton as raptor, and a bemused MILF who exchanges glances with a young man at a gas station. Sysko’s revisions of RenÉ Magritte’s modernist icon The Son of Man and the paintings of baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi, whose extraordinary talent was nearly eclipsed after she took her rapist to trial, loom large in this multifaceted portrait of womanhood. With uncommon force, The Daughter of Man confronts misogyny and violence, even as it bursts with nostalgia, lust, and poignant humor.

“When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life,” writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these rooms—the same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wright’s Prairie Style buildings—shapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: “For years after my brother’s death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths—boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn’t know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.”

In The Trouble with Light, Jeremy Michael Clark reflects on the legacy of familial trauma as he delves into questions about belonging, survival, knowledge, and self-discovery in unflinching lyrical poems. “Like you,” he writes, “I have . . . [a] history of / hardly caring for my body, of letting / whoever drink their share of me, / thinking it could cure / my fear of dirt.” Whether ruminating on intimacy, lineage, identity, faith, or addiction, Clark’s poems embody a restless, rigorous curiosity. Largely set in the poet’s hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, his portraits of interiority gracefully juxtapose the sorrows of alienation and self-neglect with the restorative power of human connection. In one of the most affectionate—and characteristically ambivalent—poems in the collection, Clark recalls, “For days, doubt struck as does lightning / across the span of night. . . . Love? If it exists, / it’s the uncertainty one feels before a thunderclap, / after the sky’s gone dark again.” A vulnerable and transporting debut, The Trouble with Light is a vital record of how grief can endure, and how we can yet endure ourselves.

In the search for a true home, what does it mean to be confronted instead by an insurmountable sense of otherness? This question dwells at the center of Saba Keramati’s Self-Mythology, which explores multiraciality and the legacy of exile alongside the poet’s uniquely American origin as the only child of political refugees from China and Iran. Keramati navigates her ancestral past while asking what language and poetry can offer to those who exist on the margins of contemporary society. Constantly scanning her world for some likeness that would help her feel less of an outsider, the poet writes, “You could cut me in half. Send the left side with my mother, / right with my father. Shape what’s missing out of clay // from their lands and still I would not belong.” Blending the personal and the political, Self-Mythology considers the futurity of diaspora in America while revealing its possibilities.

Wager, Adele Elise Williams’s raucous debut, celebrates the fearlessness and determination that can be wrested from strife. Early on, Williams confronts multiple challenges, both personal and communal, including persistent childhood anxieties and stunning neighborhood tragedies (“Ray down the street hung / himself like just-bought bananas needing time”). In the working-class communities she moves among, the poet tangles with her perceived failures as a wayward daughter, recovering addict, and skeptical scholar as she buries friends and lovers along the way. Self-possession is so hard-won in the southern gothic world of Williams’s poems, no wonder the speaker here is so roaringly audacious while often taking relish in getting close to the edge: “Sometimes God says YAHTZEE and I know this means / someone has won but someone has lost too — a holy man / is a gambling man, and that God of ours, / he takes bets after all.” Through it all, Williams pays homage to her lineage of resilient “beast women” and defiantly resists any constraint as she prods her own limits.

Julia Kolchinsky’s Parallax offers a lyrical narrative of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the ongoing war in Ukraine, the poet’s birthplace. As her child expresses a fascination with death and violence, Kolchinsky struggles to process the war unfolding far away, on the same soil where so many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust.Anchored by a series of poems that look to the moon, this collection explores displaced perspectives and turns to the celestial to offer meditations on how elements formed in distant stars account for so much of our human DNA. In these poems, writes series editor Patricia Smith, Kolchinsky “clutches at a feeling of home that is both unfamiliar and deeply treasured, longs for all that was left behind, struggles to come to terms with the rampant violence devastating a landscape that still, in so many encouraging and heartbreaking ways, belongs to her.”

Barley Child, Greg Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an electrifying human choir—male and female, child and adult, Irish and American—their voices rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, a strained Catholic faith, and a virulent legacy of madness and alcoholism.Free of nostalgia and cant, with a sharp Irish wit that often braves nearly monstrous subject matter, and reported with eyes that seldom mist over, Barley Child is a volume that once again confirms Greg Rappleye as a poet of witness.

In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time. As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.” And: “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight. Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.

Finalist, 2 25 Miller Williams Poetry Prize John Allen Taylor's debut poetry collection To Let the Sun opens with an invitation both generous and resolute: "take a walk with me . . . I hope you'll come / though I am going anyway." These poems peel back the layers of recovery as an adult from childhood sexual abuse, the myriad ways a body can change to protect itself from memory, and the difficulty of looking at abuse head-on. Taylor uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child's flight from himself, and the uncertain path home - to a life filled with small and perfect things. Through hermit crabs and golden pothos, fungal gnats and beet seed, the speaker reclaims himself: 'I am not lost . . . I know memory / is not healed by time, but / by the oddities / with which we adorn our lives, / the fragilities we need to know / we're needed by.

Samuel Piccone's Domestica firmly plants its feet at the fraught intersection of inheritance and the escape from it. Across these interrogative poems, the routines of marriage, parenthood, and faith reside in a place where "every garden is erased / by the thrum of impermanence." If "silence is the earth's way of embracing us / in whatever loneliness we think we deserve," Piccone seeks whatever answers are held in the deepest recesses of that silence. At once aphoristic and vulnerable, these poems insist that "the stars are there to ache us into asking whatever we haven't / brought ourselves to ask." To startle us into paying attention to the world.

Finalist, 2026 Miller Williams Poetry PrizeFollowing in the footsteps of poets like Hanif Abdurraqib, John Murillo, and Robert Hayden, Raphael Jenkins's Paper Pistolconsiders tenderness, heteronormativity, male friendship, grief, and the various violences implemented by and against Black men. Channeling a multitude of speakers, this collection explores Black fatherhood and "the totems we bequeath" to our young, whom the "hunter . . . see[s as] a field of bucks instead of a / field of boys. What marred your vision & made us look so killable?" With humor and vivid imagery, Paper Pistol ultimately champions familial care and poetry as the ultimate weaponry, even in the wake of generational violence. "If a pistol were made of paper," the poet dreams. "If a piece / of paper were capable of killing. If a peace. If peace / were possible."

At the core of Rogue Astronaut, Mitchell Jacobs's debut poetry collection, is a mystery: Was the poet's father abducted by aliens as a teenager? From this uncanny family lore spins a gravitational field of theory, grief, and imagination, spurring speculations about the extraterrestrial as well as the terrestrial question of familial bonds: What are the limits of understanding between two alien anatomies, between two unlike minds? Are we, after all, finally alone?In poems that continually veer from play to reverence, from body horror to bodily delight, encounters with bed bugs and cuttlefish appear side by side with retro gaming and phantom light. A brother living with delusions turns toward the sky. The poet also peers skyward in search of connection—across family lines, across the body's borders, across galaxies. Outer space becomes a metaphorical terrain where queer desire and spiritual longing collide. Just as Agent Mulder's iconic X-Files poster declares "I WANT TO BELIEVE," so do these poems ache to trust in something more—extraterrestrial life, divine presence, intimacy.Jacobs's electrifying collection offers readers a singular voice attuned to the strangeness of living now—where science fiction and memory, tenderness and dissociation, belief and doubt pulse in tangled orbit. With wit, vision, and formal inventiveness, Rogue Astronaut charts a course through the mysterious and the intimate, inviting us to imagine new ways of connecting across distance, time, and the alien terrain of self.