New Issues Poetry & Prose offers two contests annually. The Green Rose Prize is awarded to an author who has previously published at least one full-length book of poems. The New Issues Poetry Prize, an award for a first book of poems, is chosen by a guest judge. Past judges have included Philip Levine, C.K. Williams, C.D. Wright, and Campbell McGrath.

New Issues does not read manuscripts outside our contests. Graduate students in the Ph.D. and M.F.A. programs of Western Michigan University often volunteer their time reading manuscripts. Finalists are chosen by the Editors. Please visit the AWP website for guidelines for the AWP Prize for the novel.

Guidelines: The 2009 Green Rose Prize
Guidelines: The 2009 New Issues Poetry Prize Judge: to be announced
Guidelines: AWP Award Series in the Novel

View a list of past winners.

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Winner of the 2008 Green Rose Prize in Poetry
Patty Seyburn, Hilarity

The Editors of New Issues Poetry & Prose are pleased to announce the winner of the 2008 Green Rose Prize: Patty Seyburn, for her manuscript Hilarity. Patty Seyburn wins a $2,000 award and publication of her manuscript with New Issues in spring 2009.

Patty Seyburn has published two books of poems: Mechanical Cluster (Ohio State University Press, 2002) and Diasporadic (Helicon Nine Editions, 1998) which won the 1997 Marianne Moore Poetry Prize and the American Library Association's Notable Book Award for 2000. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including The Paris Review, New England Review, Field, Slate, Crazyhorse, Cutbank, Quarterly West, Bellingham Review, Connecticut Review, Cimarron Review, Third Coast and Western Humanities Review. Seyburn grew up in Detroit, earned a BS and an MS in Journalism from Northwestern University, an MFA in Poetry from University of California, Irvine, and a Ph.D. in Poetry and Literature from the University of Houston. She is an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach and co-editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry, based in Los Angeles.

Also chosen for publication in the Green Rose Series:
Missing Her by Claudia Keelan

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Winner of the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize
Judge: Marie Howe
Sandra Beasley has won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for her manuscript Theories of Falling, which will be published in March of 2008.

From the judge's statement:
"I kept coming back to these poems—the tough lyric voice that got under my skin. Clear, intent, this poet doesn't want to fool herself or anybody else. Desire pushes defeat against the wall, and the spirit climbs up from underground ( 'Even the tame dogs dream of biting clear to the bone.' ) Is it a her? I feel it must be—a woman's voice: from the inside."

Sandra Beasley lives in Washington, D.C., where she works on the editorial staff of The American Scholar. Her poems have appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Blackbird, RHINO, Poet Lore, and New Orleans Review, and have also been featured on Verse Daily and in the 2005 Best New Poets. Her awards include the 2006 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North and fellowships to Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Jenny McKean Moore Workshop, and the Millay Colony. She studied poetry at the University of Virginia and received her M.F.A. from American University.

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The AWP Award Series in the Novel
We Agreed to Meet Just Here, a novel by Scott Blackwood
Judge: Robert Eversz

Scott Blackwood's award-winning collection of stories, In the Shadow of Our House, was published by SMU Press in 2001. His fiction has appeared most recently in the Gettysburg Review, Boston Review and Southwest Review, and the title story from his collection is featured on the New York Times Book Review's "First Chapters" website. While on a Dobie-Paisano fellowship in 2005, He completed We Agreed to Meet Just Here, a novel set in the Deep Eddy Neighborhood of Austin, Texas. Blackwood holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Texas State University. He's currently the Program Coordinator of the Undergraduate Writing Center at the University of Texas at Austin and teaches fiction writing in UT's Evening School. He lives in Austin with his wife and two daughters.

Robert Eversz, Judge:
"We Agreed to Meet Just Here is a lyrical mystery about disappearance, told in precise and luminous prose. A young lifeguard in an unnamed Austin suburb vanishes one night while returning from a screening of The Third Man. A doctor, ill with cancer, goes missing from his home, and is later seen, bearded and ragged, wandering the aisles of a grocery store. A car is stolen, the unseen consequences tragic. One child is given up to adoption, another is lost up a tree. The absences are so keenly felt, in the drifting lucidity of the author’s sentences, that every reappearance reads like a small miracle."

 

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