Orison Books is pleased to announce the results of The 2024 Orison Prizes in Fiction & Poetry.
FICTION RESULTS
Kaveh Akbar has selected the novella "Shared Perspectives" by Jake Young as the fiction winner from a pool of anonymous finalist manuscripts. Young will receive $1,500 and publication by Orison Books.
We'd like to recognize the following finalists and semi-finalists.
FICTION FINALISTS
Alyson Dutemple, "Marvelous Freaks of Nature!" Saúl Hernández, "Meet Me at Woodlawn Lake (I'm Still Waiting for You)"
Patricia Schultheis, "This Thing with Sticks and Other Stories"
Keely Shinners, "Archaeology of Angel"
FICTION SEMI-FINALISTS
Edward Black, "Sunday Sermon" Joseph Levens, "Critical Cartography and Other Stories" Martin Perlman, "The Shy Guy Stories"
Jill Rosenberg, "Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself"
John Whalen, "Boy Also Happens to Fly"
ABOUT "SHARED PERSPECTIVES"
About the winning manuscript, Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!, writes: "Shared Perspectives is a brilliant vortical rush of mind and action channeling Pascal and Borges and Sebald but also Sarah Manguso and Benjamin Labatut, rendering elliptically what linear narrative would cudgel into meaningless bromide. Such a delightfully bizarre, lyric, dazzling achievement."
ABOUT THE WINNER
Jake Young is the author of the poetry collections American Oak, What They Will Say, and All I Wanted as well as the essay collection True Terroir. With Rebecca Pelky, he is the co-translator of Desnuda / Naked, poems by Matilde Ladrón de Guevara. He received his MFA from North Carolina State University, his PhD from the University of Missouri, and his MPH at the University of Chicago where he was a Fellow at The MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Young serves as Poetry Editor for Chicago Quarterly Review.
POETRY RESULTS
Ellen Bass has selected "Belly God" by Jeremy Radin as the poetry winner from a pool of anonymous finalist manuscripts. Radin will receive $1,500 and publication by Orison Books.
We'd like to recognize the following finalists and semi-finalists.
POETRY FINALISTS
Colin Criss, "Hinterman"
Sati Mookherjee, "Ars Dialectica"
Kirk Wilson, "Travel"
Marco Yan, "Whoever Told Me Not to Dive Headfirst Dove Headfirst & Knew the Taste" Anne Yarbrough, "Scrap, Feather, Bone"
POETRY SEMI-FINALISTS
Emma Aprile, "Little Maps, Small Degrees"
nicole v basta, "eva, anna, alfreda"
Alexandra Burack, "One Bulb-Night Exile"
Samantha DeFlitch, "Singing Ground"
Marcia Falk, "The Sky Will Overtake You"
Brian Patrick Heston, "Tenements of Bone"
Fran Markover, "How In Springtime I'll Kneel"
Scudder Parker, "The Poem of the World"
Susan Blackwell Ramsey, "Crossing Inkster Bridge"
Candice Reffe, "Immortality Among Fruit Trees" Kelly Sawin, "In the Beginning God Made a Garden" Adrian T Quintanar, "Datura"
ABOUT "BELLY GOD"
About the winning manuscript, Ellen Bass, author of Indigo, writes: "These are extraordinary poems, brutally and tenderly honest. Smart. Intimate. Witty. Admirably crafted. From the opening poem of Belly God I was excited to be in communion with Jeremy Radin’s sensibility. Galway Kinnell said, 'To me, poetry is somebody standing up, so to speak, and saying, with as little concealment as possible, what it is for him or her to be on earth at this moment.' That sounds easy, but it takes great skill. And Radin has done it!"
ABOUT THE WINNER
Jeremy Radin is a writer and actor. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, Ploughshares, The Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, The Sun, and elsewhere. He is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Slow Dance with Sasquatch (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012) and Dear Sal (Not A Cult, 2022). He is the founder and operator of Lanternist Creative Consulting, through which he coaches writers and performers.
THE 2025 ORISON PRIZES
The 2025 Orison Prizes in Fiction & Poetry will be open for submissions from December 1, 2024 – April 1, 2025. The judges will be Tessa Fontaine (fiction), author of The Red Grove and The Electric Woman, and Phillip B. Williams (poetry), author of Ours, Mutiny, and Thief in the Interior.