Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Matthew Rohrer, has selected Slipstream by Diana Cao of Cambridge, Massachusetts as the winner of the 2024 Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book of Poetry. The editors of Tupelo Press also had the honor and pleasure of selecting an international winner, Avia Tadmor, whose manuscript, Song in Tammuz, will be published in celebration of our international distribution partnership with the University of Chicago. Both poets will receive a $3,000 cash prize, in addition to publication by Tupelo Press, 20 copies of the winning title, a book launch, and international distribution with energetic publicity and promotion. All manuscripts were judged anonymously.
2024 Berkshire Prize Winner
Diana Cao’s poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. She has received support from MacDowell, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and she is Just Buffalo Literary Center’s 2024 Poetry Fellow, selected by Megan Fernandes. She is a winner of Nimrod International’s 2023 Neruda Prize, selected by Tarfia Faizullah, and her first chapbook, Relational, is available from Sixth Finch.
Judge’s Citation
I’m so glad that you will get to have the same experience I did—reading SLIPSTREAM for the first time and realizing, with a smile, that you’re in good hands. SLIPSTREAM moves effortlessly between so many registers – and is a beautiful and deft mix of tradition, structure and modernity. And you will learn about the connection between ancient Chinese tales and moon landers. Few books are this engaged with our daily interactions with robots. I love the way SLIPSTREAM both acknowledges the ubiquity of being online and reminds us just how dumb it all really is. Throughout this book, no matter what the subject, the language is elegant and straightforward and clear; in a word, it’s beautiful.
She has a way of writing about herself while using the language and worldview of the ancients. There’s even a sestina that’s actually good— we all know the form is too bossy and they never really work. But there’s a sestina here that’s loose with the rules, and so it flows; it’s a triumph.
Sestinas, Villanelles, a crown of sonnets, linked verse: the way the old forms are made to feel spoken and modern is a delight. This whole book is a delight. Even with the impressive range of subjects and positionally here, the book ends with a quiet intimacy that will have you sitting up and paying attention, sad to have it end.
–Matthew Rohrer, judge for the 2024 Berkshire Prize
2024 Berkshire Prize International Winner
Avia Tadmor’s poems can be found in The New Republic, New England Review, Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. Her poetry received fellowships and awards from Yaddo, the Rona Jaffe Foundation/Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Adroit Journal’s Gregory Djanikian Scholars Program. Avia is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. Born in Jerusalem, she lives in New York.
Judge’s Citation
Avia Tadmor’s stunning debut collection, Song in Tammuz, draws from an incredible range of literary forms, from familiar couplets and tercets to footnotes, dictionary definitions, and luminous lyric fragments. While stylistically daring, even virtuosic, Tadmor’s work is unified by its enduring engagement with questions of language and alterity: What does it mean to be othered by and through language? What happens when grammar, syntax, and the concepts of identity housed within them are at odds? Does a revolutionary message demand new forms of discourse? “I can say it through the distance of this other tongue,” Tadmor writes. Indeed, she considers the role of language—from conceptual framework to vast storehouse of history, culture, and inheritance—in shaping the self, ultimately revealing our agency within a grammar and syntax we did not choose. As Tadmor herself writes, “Her pen is a stronghold, a lighthouse / flickering late in July.” This is a book you will not soon forget.
–The Editors, Tupelo Press
Honorable Mention for the 2024 Berkshire Prize
Crowd Noise by Stephen Danos of Portland, Oregon.
Finalists for the 2024 Berkshire Prize
Collective by Katie Berta of Tempe, Arizona.
Ofrenda by Anaïs Deal-Márquez of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Beauty Talk by Asa Drake of Ocala, Florida.
REDWORK by Stefania Gomez of Chicago, Illinois.
Sky Burial by Summer J. Hart of Cold Spring, New York.
Entered Some Aliens by Siew Hii of Raleigh, North Carolina.
Name and Earth by Kylan Rice of Columbia, Missouri.
#TheRebelSonnets by Bino A. Realuyo of New York, New York.
Infinite Scroll / Infinite Eye by Martin Rock of Solana Beach, California.
Semifinalists for the 2024 Berkshire Prize
So Much Space for Light by Allison Albino of New York, New York.
Unholy Daughters by Dana Alsamsam of Somerville, Massachusetts.
uvulal matters; or, last thursday a boy found his own body in the nearby river by Ben Claus of Denver, Colorado.
Every Room With You Inside by Colby Cotton of Santa Monica, California.
Butcher by Kylie Gellatly of Providence, Rhode Island.
Neither Kind of Body by AM Goodhart of Madison, Wisconsin.
Circuitry by Emily Oliver of Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Death Refractions by Ben Pease of Brandon, Vermont.
Public House by Dylan Weir of Chicago, Illinois.
Chiffonography by Julia Wholsetter of Portland, Oregon.
Someday All the Bones Will Be Gathered Into a Body by Cory Zeller of Syracuse, New York.
Enormous thanks as well to our terrific readers and judge, Matthew Rohrer.
Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently THE SKY CONTAINS THE PLANS, published by Wave Books. THE OTHERS won the Believer Book Award, A GREEN LIGHT was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and his first book A HUMMOCK IN THE MALOOKAS was selected by Mary Oliver for the National Poetry Series. Rohrer attended The University of Michigan, University College Dublin and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He was a co-founder of Fence Magazine and has taught writing at NYU for many years. One of his tattoos has appeared in two books of literary tattoos. He lives in Brooklyn.
Our heart-felt gratitude goes out to all who sent us your manuscripts and who, by your writing, link arms in the tireless, solitary, and so-important work of making poetry. So many more manuscripts than we can mention here gave us countless hours of reading pleasure.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we hope you will consider letting us see your full-length manuscript again, as our annual Summer Open Reading Period is currently open until August 31st. Thank you and we look forward to reading your work!