2022 Alice James Award Winner Announced
2022 Alice James Award Winner Announced
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Alice James Award is Willie Kinard III of Newberry, South Carolina for their manuscript, Orders of Service. Kinard will receive $2,000 and his collection will be published in November 2023. The Editorial Board has chosen one additional manuscript for publication, as Editors’ Choice: Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali of Fremont, California. Ali’s collection will be published in January 2024 and she will receive $1,000.
Willie Lee Kinard III (he/they) is a poet, designer & musician forged in Newberry, South Carolina. With work appearing or forthcoming in the Adroit Journal, Boston Review, The Rumpus, & elsewhere, he is the winner of POETRY's 2021 J. Howard & Barbara M. J. Wood Prize & a Fellow of The Watering Hole. Co-creator of For the Scribes, alongside poet AsiahMae, go see ‘bout them at www.williekinard.com.
Sarah Ghazal Ali is a Pakistani poet based in the Bay Area, CA. She received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Juniper and MFA Fellow. Her work appears in Poet Lore, Narrative, Memorious, and Waxwing, among other journals and anthologies. The recipient of fellowships and grants from the Kenyon Review, The Seventh Wave, and the Hambidge Center, Sarah currently serves as editor-in-chief of Palette Poetry.
Finalists for the award were: A Natural History of Oblivion by Trey Moody, BEFORELIGHT by Matthew Gellman, Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson, BLOOD RADIO by L. A. Johnson, Brief on the History of Naming by Nicole Arocho Hernández, I Don't Want To Be Understood by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Fabulosa by Karen Rigby, In Another Country by Andrea Jurjević, The End of Everything and Everything That Comes After That by Nick Lantz, What Survives is the Fire by Barbara Schwartz, and Yes and No by Sarah Edwards.
Thank you to everyone who submitted their manuscript to this year’s award and to our editorial board members Andrés Cerpa, Sumita Chakraborty, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Joseph Fasano, Lucia LoTempio, Elizabeth Lyons, Cynthia Manick, Matthew Nienow, Jacques J. Rancourt, and Ira Sadoff. We’re grateful for the interest in and support of Alice James Books.
