Tupelo Press Announces the Results of the 2020 Dorset Prize

Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that Meredith Stricker of Carmel, California has been selected by Maggie Smith from among a field of seventeen finalists for her manuscript “re-wilding” to win the 2020 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Meredith Stricker will receive a $3,000 cash prize, a writing residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, publication by Tupelo Press, and national distribution. 

Meredith Stricker is a visual artist and poet working in cross-genre media. She is the author of Our Animal (Omnidawn), Tenderness Shore, (L.S.U.) and Alphabet Theater:performance poetry (Wesleyan University Press) along with the chapbooks mistake, (Caketrain Press) and anemochore (Newfound Press). 

She received the National Poetry Series Award, the Omnidawn Open Book Prize, the Gloria Anzaldúa Award and was a finalist for the Boston Poetry Review Annual Poetry Contest and for the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and T.S. Eliot Foundation.

Her poetry and mixed-media work have appeared in performance and gallery spaces as well as on-line and print in Conjunctions, Tupelo Quarterly, Drunken Boat, Ploughshares and numerous other journals. New series are forthcoming in the Boston Poetry Review anthology Allies and the Best American Experimental Writing on-line anthology from Wesleyan.

She co-directs visual poetry studio, a collaborative that focuses on architecture in Big Sur, California and projects to bring together artists, writers, musicians and experimental forms.  

Judge’s Citation

re-wilding is one of the most exciting and original collections I’ve read in years. The poems reject compartmentalization and instead push us toward connection and synthesis, toward all the meanwhiles in this life: 1948: Hiroshima / 1948: the first shopping mall is built in the U.S.” With the perfect balance of dark humor and vulnerability, this poet grapples with climate change, capitalism, the horrors of human history: “is this what happens when grammar runs out/ and we hear the sound the world makes?” “If redemption is possible,” I think it will require us to see the whole—to back up far enough to see the shape of this life, this time. I’m grateful for the wide, generous lens of this book, and this poet, right now. I see—perceive—differently having spent time inside these poems.

—Maggie Smith

Finalists for the Dorset Prize

Threa Almontaser of Raleigh, North Carolina, The Wild Fox of Yemen 

Diana Arterian of Los Angeles, California, Agrippina the Younger: An Allegory 

Zachary Cotler of Healdsburg, California, Externalities

Jaydn DeWald of Bogart, Georgia, The Rosebud Variations

Noah Eli Gordon of Denver, Colorado, Cake

Rochelle Hurt of Orlando, Florida, Rehearsals for [ ] Girls

Catherine Imbriglio, Riverside, Rhode Island, [NUMERACY]

Oksana Maksymchuk of Fayetteville, Arkansas, Tongue Ties 

Sarah Mangold of Edmonds, Washington, Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners

Matthew Minicucci of Portland, Oregon, Stage Weapons and Other Dramatic Objects 

Cameron McGill of Moscow, Idaho, In the Night Field 

David Mutschlecner of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Two Poems

Jose Padua of Washington D.C., for Earth Shattering News and Other Catastrophes Considered While Listening to The Genius of Love

Eric Pankey of Fairfax, Virginia, Dusk Seen from Above

Kathleen Peirce of Wimberley, Texas, Lion’s Paw 

Sasha Steensen of Fort Collins, Colorado, Well

Semi-Finalists for the Dorset Prize

Kwame Bakari of Burlington, New Jersey, Even in Such Light

Jody Chan of Toronto, Ontario, Impact Statement

Carrie Chappel of Paris, France, Rooned 

Barbara Duffey of Mitchell, South Dakota, Cultivar 

Jen DeGregorio of Harrison, New Jersey, What to Wear Out 

John de Stefano of New York, New York, The Roadless Travels 

Dante Di Stefano of Owego, New York, Lullaby with Incendiary Device 

Patrick James Errington of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Second Hand 

Julian Gewirtz of Somerville, Massachusetts, TO X

Lissa Kiernan of West Hurley, New York, Second Life 

Anita Olivia Koester of Charlottesville, Virginia, Griefland, a Map 

Michael Marberry of Columbus, Ohio, Lineage 

Elizabeth Metzger of Pacific Palisades, California, Lying In

Alycia Pirmohamed of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, Another Way to Split Water

Phoebe Reeves of Cincinnati, Ohio, The Lexographer’s Garden 

Stephanie Schlaifer of Saint Louis, Missouri, Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs 

Barbara Tomash of Berkeley, California, Her Scant State 

Maya Jewell Zeller of Spokane, Washington, / out takes / glove box / 

Please join us in congratulating Meredith Stricker, our finalists and semifinalists, and all who entered manuscripts in the Dorset Prize for delighting us with a stunning number of terrific submissions. By your writing, each of you joins in the solitary and so-important work of making poetry. Many, many thanks to our judge, Maggie Smith, for blessing us with the so-very-hard (and largely unsung) work of selecting a winner, and for writing a superbly thoughtful citation. Please bear in mind that the Berkshire Prize for a First of Second Book of Poetry is on now, judged by Bin Ramke. See submission guidelines here.