2009 FIELD POETRY PRIZE

The editors of FIELD are pleased to announce the thirteenth annual FIELD Poetry Prize. The contest is open to all poets, whether or not they have previously published in book form. Unpublished poetry manuscripts between 50 and 80 pages in length will be considered. Oberlin College Press publishes the winning manuscript in the FIELD Poetry Series and awards the winning author one thousand dollars ($1,000).

Manuscripts must be postmarked during May 2009. The contest reading fee is $25 and includes one year’s subscription to FIELD. Please make checks payable to Oberlin College Press.

Manuscripts will not be returned. Include a self-addressed, stamped postcard if you wish to be notified that your manuscript has been received at our office.

All manuscripts will be judged by the editors, David Young and David Walker. We will announce the winner here in August 2009.

Send manuscript and reading fee to:

FIELD Poetry Prize
Oberlin College Press
50 North Professor Street
Oberlin, OH 44074

Please note: Persons interested in submitting work for the FIELD Translation Series should read the guidelines.

Council of Literary Magazines and Presses

Contest Code of Ethics

CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to
1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors;
2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines—defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and
3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public. This Code recognizes that different contest models produce different results, but that each model can be run ethically.
We have adopted this Code to reinforce our integrity and dedication as a publishing community and to ensure that our contests contribute to a vibrant literary heritage.

Oberlin College Press supports the CLMP code, and in an effort to make our contest selection process as ethical as possible, close friends, relatives, and those whose manuscripts have been shaped in any way by the contest judges are ineligible to enter our contest.

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Previous Winners

(Click on covers for further information)

J. W. Marshall
MEANING A CLOUD
Winner of the 2007 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Watchful, ruefully comic, alight with playful lyric precision and a plainspoken rhetorical elegance, Meaning a Cloud is not only a record of one body's recovery from injury but a rendering of the mind's companion journey: pained, stubbornly amused, at last arriving at a state of visionary completion."
--Susan Hutton

Mary Cornish
RED STUDIO
Winner of the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize

"As the painters once used the broken yolks of eggs, the rocks, and the earth itself to make their colors, so Mary Cornish has made these miraculous poems: so intelligently wrought the page disappears, so gorgeous I stand and stare. At the core of each is human life, fiercely known and loved and endured. These are the poems of a radiantly alive adult woman."
--Marie Howe

Jean Gallagher
STUBBORN
Winner of the 2005 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Jean Gallagher majestically conducts a history of approaches to the sacred in Christian art, scripture, mysticism, theology. She rewrites the Bible as she re-sees the 'gravities, necessities, haphazard plots' behind the frozen sacramental moments of religious art. In a sequence here based on a Duccio altarpiece a bewildered apostle experiences the resurrected Christ 'like a language / I don't know ... and there's never been an alphabet for it, ever.' Now--because of Jean Gallagher's splendid experiment--there is."
--Bruce Beasley

Beckian Fritz Goldberg
LIE AWAKE LAKE
Winner of the 2004 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Lie Awake Lake is made out of a brilliance of thought, of heart, and of language that we find only in the truest poetry. This fierce homage to the body and to the spirit reminds me of Ettie Hillesum's letters from the transit camp at Westerbork in the Netherlands in 1942-43; it is as relentless and unmediated as if it was letters or diaries, but it is song--come to give us human animals pleasure and to help us endure."
--Jean Valentine

Jonah Winter
AMNESIA
Winner of the 2003 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Jonah Winter resides in the Hotel Amnesia, the Hotel of Stars--and though he's a comedian, his room is one along the corridor of the wistful, urbane dreamers: Joseph Cornell, Jean Cocteau. Anais Nin, Charles Simic. At the heart of his method is the list, almost verbless: his marvelous catalogues place unlikely things side by side, creating within the frame of the poem the tantalizing windows of the city of dream."
--Mark Doty

Carol Moldaw
THE LIGHTNING FIELD
Winner of the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize

In her third collection, Carol Moldaw explores new territory in poems that are thematically far-reaching and technically superb. The book includes three long sequences based on art and artifact in various stages of completeness: preliminary pen-and-ink studies, Turkish ruins, and, at the center, the site-specific art installation that gives the book its title and impetus. Attracting charged material as a lightning field attracts lightning, the poems reference narrative but move beneath and beyond it through a restless and rewarding insistence on making and remaking, on seeing by degrees and seeing whole.

Angie Estes
VOICE-OVER
Winner of the 2001 FIELD Poetry Prize

"Angie Estes' stunning new collection of poems is a brilliant and intellectually dazzling investigation of the often unstable relationship between language and experience. These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate the oscillations of event and memory in order to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed interweaving--in our lives--of action, meditation, and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off every page of this rich, compelling, and essential new book of poetry."
--David St. John

Ralph Burns
GHOST NOTES
Winner of the 2000 FIELD Poetry Prize

In his deeply innovative and beautifully human Ghost Notes, Ralph Burns explores the vivid relation between American jazz and American poetry. His book embodies the movement of jazz. In the long title poem he plays wide open, without a mute, as Red Allen advises. The result is inclusive and exhilarating, a structure that keeps on opening and opening.

Timothy Kelly
STRONGER
Winner of the 1999 FIELD Poetry Prize

Timothy Kelly grew up in Cleveland and contemplated careers in medicine and rock music before settling on his double vocation as poet and physical therapist, based in Olympia, Washington. He writes about his work, his family, his memories of growing up, and the natural area in which he lives and often hikes. The human body, in all its manifestations and meanings, forms the natural center of his poetic vision.

Marcia Southwick
A SATURDAY NIGHT AT THE FLYING DOG & OTHER POEMS
Winner of the 1998 FIELD Poetry Prize

High-spirited and unpredictable, Marcia Southwick's third collection is, among other things, a remarkable mirror of our place and time. With unrelenting curiosity and brio, she reflects our materialistic, shopping-obsessed, informationally-exploding, and deeply confused culture right back at us, showing us the world we live in with unflinching honesty and compassionate affection.

Jon Loomis
VANITAS MOTEL
Winner of the 1997 FIELD Poetry Prize

Things happen in Vanitas Motel: a funeral, a fistfight, an outburst at a poetry reading. Its poems are surreal parables, at once funny and dark, sensual and deeply serious. Their revealed subjects are loss, art, illness, and desire.

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Information about our annual poetry book contest.