Tupelo Press is especially delighted to announce that our judge, Ilya Kaminsky, has selected Conjugations of Mothering by Mónica Gomery of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as winner of the 2024 Helena Whitehill Book Award.
Mónica Gomery is the author of Might Kindred, winner of the Prairie Schooner/Raz-Shumaker Book Prize (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), and Here is the Night and the Night on the Road (Cooper Dillon Books, 2018). Her work has been awarded the American Poetry Review’s Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, and Palette Poetry’s Sappho Prize for Women Poets. New poems appear most recently in Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, West Branch, and Poetry Daily. A queer, first generation Venezuelan-American poet and rabbi, she lives on unceded Lenni Lenape land in Philadelphia, where she serves on the clergy team of Kol Tzedek synagogue.
Here’s what our contest judge, Ilya Kaminsky, had to say about the winning book:
“Way too late / for elegies about the earth,” this poet tells us, “to late for compost, eco-poem”– our world is on fire. And yet, in this book, on page, the character still makes sure to “bring all the plants into the bathroom. Turns each / measuring cup’s silver ear into the brown world beneath it, the water listening for where it needs to spread.” One of the ancient functions of poetry is to heal and repair the world, despite all the devastation–and this need for repair of our moment is everywhere in these poems’ imagery and tone. Despite all the tragedy we see around us, the poems speak of “a friend / [who] cooks Condolence Lasagna. / A neighbor neighbors / her elder. Each day, the world asks / to be born.” Conjugations of Mothering is a book to live with.
—Ilya Kaminsky
Our sincere congratulations to Mónica Gomery and all of our finalists.
Finalists for the Helena Whitehill Book Award
Late Work Near Dark by Kate Bolton Bonnici of Los Angeles, California.
Diary: Poems by Maxine Chernoff of Mill Valley, California.
Swan Fucker by Jan Clausen of New York, New York.
Crowd Noise by Stephen Danos of Portland, Oregon.
We Carry These Bones to Market by Shou Jie Eng of Hartford, Connecticut.
Rivermouth Shouting by Jean Gallagher of New York, New York.
Of Fish & Country by Stephanie Glazier of Detroit, Michigan.
in the desert the rain by Rachel Kaufman of Los Angeles, California.
Bone Symphony by Michelle Phuong Ho of New Haven, Connecticut.
Lightboxes by Rochelle Hurt of Orlando, Florida.
Ariadne’s Crown by Julie Gonnering Lein of Rapid City, South Dakota.
Virga by Cameron McGill of Moscow Idaho.
Birthstones in the Province of Mercy by Bo Hee Moon.
Windshear by Christopher Nelson of Grinnell, Iowa.
Gigantic by Kent Shaw of Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
What is Simple by Megan Shevenock of Los Angeles, California.
Green Card by Jeddie Sophronius of Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Campus Novel by Matthew Weitman of Houston, Texas.
The Water in Your Quiet World by Jessica Zinz of Bowling Green, Ohio.
Congratulations again to our winner and finalists. Special thanks to Tupelo Press Board Member Sally Whitehill, whose incredible generosity made this award possible. Enormous thanks as well to our terrific readers and our judge, Ilya Kaminsky.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf and Los Angeles Times Book Awards and finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and T. S. Eliot Prize; Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which received multiple awards, including the Dorset Prize and the American Academy of Arts & Letters’ Metcalf Award; and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). In addition to his writing, Kaminsky is also an editor and translator of many other books, including Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books, 2012) and The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010).
The American Academy of Arts & Letters, into which Kaminsky was inducted in 2023, described his poems as “a literary counterpart to [Marc] Chagall in which laws of gravity have been suspended and colors reassigned, but only to make everyday reality that much more indelible.”
Kaminsky’s other awards and honors include the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in Poetry, and a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2019, he received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, which recognizes distinguished poetic achievement.
In 2019, the BBC named Kaminsky among “12 Artists who changed the world.”
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 manuscript again, as our Dorset Prize is open through the end of January, our annual Snowbound Chapbook Prize is open through February 28th, and our Berkshire Prize for a First or Second Book closes to submissions on April 31st. Thank you and we look forward to reading your work!