Tupelo Press is delighted to announce that Lightboxes by Rochelle Hurt of Orlando, Floridahas been selected by Eleanor Wilner to win the 2025 Dorset Prize. Hurt receives a $3,000 cash prize, a writing residency, publication by Tupelo Press, and national distribution.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of the poetry collections The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022); In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014); as well as Book of Non (Broadstone Books, 2023), a collaboration with Carol Guess. Her work has been included in Poetry magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. She’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, Jentel, and Yaddo. Originally from the Ohio Rust Belt, Hurt now lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
Judge’s Citation:
Lightboxes is an aptly named collection of mostly square (don’t be fooled by the word) paragraph containers of heightened language that illuminate works of visual art, the lives and world that are their source, and the acute consciousness examining them. Each “lightbox” exhibits the writer’s associative freedom into revelations about her own life while sharpening perception of a challenging work by a visual artist–most of them modern or contemporary, and yes, all 47 artists are women, and otherwise, entirely unclassifiable.
And while that last word hangs in the air, it hovers over my sense of Lightboxes’ brilliance of style–– its refusal to settle, its nimble ironic wit, its exhilarating candor, the way it investigates an artist’s life and times through her art, the way it empowers a willingness to reveal us to ourselves (“…certainty. There is a way to wrap yourself in it so nobody sees the questions they aren’t asking.” ) So, too, her audacious refusal to fear insight, no matter the breakage; to keep looking until attention creates affinity: “eventually, i pass her enough times that the missing girl on the flyers outside starts to seem like family…” This speaker, this lower case i with her searching mind, makes art’s mute, provocative imagery an invitation to a verbally, historically rich personal act of responsive and subversive creation.
Ekphrastic poetry’s exciting collaboration also includes the reader, who, along with the lightbox poems, has access to their initiating images in the online browser’s museum without walls, one lightbox illuminating the other. And at the end, the box on the page breaks into long, separate lines as the culminating poem mimes its entrance into Cecilia Vicuña’s “Quipu Womb,” a work that has the viewer standing in a huge, hanging set of red thread lines, heavy and knotted, enveloped in “the story of women—the minute you enter, blood overwhelms you…” So it is with this collection, each lightbox like a quipu on life’s bloodlines, poetry’s lifelines, clotted and knotted with truth, freed of finality in an open mind: “the story of red thread is a long one—you can stand in the middle of it and not see either end…”
—Eleanor Wilner
Runner-up:
Barbara Tomash of Berkeley, California. Biography in a Walled Garden.
Finalists:
Mag Gabbert of Dallas, Texas. Why on Earth.
Charity Gingerich of Uniontown, Ohio. This is Not a Story about Getting Lost.
David Gorin of San Francisco, California. A Pale Green Star.
Bino Realuyo of New York, New York. #TheRebelSonnets.
Jen Siraganian of San Jose, California. Journal for Pomegranates.
Jeddie Sophronius of Charlottesville, Virginia. Green Card.
Stephanie Strickland of New York, New York. Mathematics Is A Language.
Julie Marie Wade of Dania Beach, Florida. THIS IS JEOPARDY!
Matthew Weitman of Houston, Texas. The Campus Novel.
JinJin Xu of New York, New York. Against This Earth, We Knock.
Semifinalists:
Dana Alsamsam of Somerville, Massachusetts. Where Jasmine Grows.
Kimberly Andrews of Ottawa, Ontario. The Lake.
Craig Beaven of Tallahassee, Florida. Request to the God Trinket.
Devon Branca of Hamilton, New York. Game Length.
Abigail Dembo of Iowa City, Iowa. The Lamp and Other Sources of Shadow.
Jean Gallaher of New York, New York. Rivermouth Shouting.
Kylie Q. Gellatly of Providence, Rhode Island. Butcher.
Jasmine Khaliq of Salt Lake City, Utah. Somewhere Horses.
Luisa Igloria of Norfolk, Virginia. The Wound Makes Bearable What Comes After.
Angelo Mao of Charlottesville, Virginia. A White Horse Is Not a Horse.
Leslie Adrienne Miller of St. Paul, Minnesota. Derrida’s Cat.
Michael Mlekoday of Olympia, Washington. I Think I’m Almost Ready to See the Ocean.
Martha Ronk of Los Angeles, California. infused by.
Andrew Seguin of New York, New York. Porcupine Diary.
Cat Wei of Brooklyn, New York. This Pleasure.
Dylan Weir of Chicago, Illinois. Public House.
Katharine Whitcomb of Swanton, Vermont. The Earth Clock: A Cycle.
Emily Paige Wilson of Asheville, North Carolina. Orange Blossom Sugar: The Story of Marie Lafarge.
We wish to congratulate Rochelle Hurt, our runner-up, distinguished 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, Eleanor Wilner, 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 open now, judged by Carolyn Forché. See submission guidelines here.