2023 Alice James Award Winner Announced
2023 Alice James Award Winner Announced
We are pleased to announce that the winner of the Alice James Award is Esther Lin of Seattle, Washington for her manuscript, Cold Thief Place. She will receive $5,000 and her collection will be published in March 2025. The Editorial Board has chosen one additional manuscript for publication, as Editor’s Choice: When the Horses by Mary Helen Callier of Denver, Colorado. Callier’s collection will be published in April 2025 and she will receive $1,000.
Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of The Ghost Wife, winner of the 2017 Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship. She was also a 2019–20 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, and a 2017–2019 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Currently she co-organizes the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers that they face in the literary community.
Mary Helen Callier’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Washington Square Review, Bennington Review, The Arkansas International, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, where she was a Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Fellow and the recipient of a Howard Nemerov Prize. She grew up in Columbus, Georgia, and is currently a doctoral student in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver.
Finalists for the award were: BEFORELIGHT by Matthew Gellman, In the Absence of Safe Space by Eli Estochen, Splashed Things by Leigh Lucas, That Which Echoes by Sarah Maria Medina, (AT) WRIST by Tacey Atsitty, Louisiana Saturday Nights by Megan J. Arlett, Flesh Disobedient by Yuxi Lin, SMOTHER by Rachel Richardson, Pathetic Fallacy by JP Grasser, In the Cathedral of My Undoing by Kellam Ayres, American Refugee by May Lee-Yang and This Stays Between Us by Sam Ross.
Thank you to everyone who submitted their manuscript to this year’s award and to our editorial board members Sumita Chakraborty, Cortney Lamar Charleston, 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.
