2019 Alice James Award Winner Announced
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Alice James Award is Rosebud Ben-Oni of Sunnyside, New York, for her manuscript, If This Is the Age We End Discovery. She will receive $2,000 and her collection will be published in April 2021. The Editorial Board has chosen two additional manuscripts for publication, as Editor’s Choices: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything by Jane Wong of Bellingham, Washington, and Brocken Spectre by Jacques Rancourt of San Francsico, California. Wong’s collection will be published in October 2021 and she will receive $1,000. Rancourt’s collection will be published in September 2021 and he will receive $1,000.
Rosebud Ben-Oni is a recipient of the 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellowship. Her work appears in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, POETS.org, The Poetry Review (UK), Tin House, Guernica, among others. Her poem "Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark" was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. Her second collection of poems, turn around, BRXGHT XYXS, was selected as Agape Editions' EDITORS' CHOICE, and will be published in 2019. She writes for The Kenyon Review blog. Find her at 7TrainLove.org
Jane Wong's poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, American Poetry Review, Third Coast, AGNI, and others. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Fine Arts Work Center, Hedgebrook, Artist Trust, and Bread Loaf. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
Jacques J. Rancourt is the author of Novena, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize (Pleiades Press, 2017), and the chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). His poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets, among others. He has held poetry fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He lives in San Francisco.
Finalists for the award were: Husk by Leslie Marie Aguilar, Brother Sleep by Aldo Amparán, Tableau Where She Speaks by Margaret Cipriano, My Father, the Light by Michael Dhyne, Gorgoneion by Casey Rocheteau and As She Appears by Shelley Wong.
Thank you everyone who submitted their manuscript to this year’s award and to our editorial board members Andrés Cerpa, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Joseph Fasano, Elizabeth Lyons, Vandana Khanna, Suzanne Parker, and Matthew Pennock. We’re grateful for the interest in and support of Alice James Books. Best of luck with your writing!
All best,
Carey Salerno
Executive Editor
FEATURED TITLES
