The winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Gbenga Adesina for “Death Does Not End at the Sea."
The winning title was chosen by guest judges Joseph Millar and Hilda Raz with Kwame Dawes, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner. Adesina will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.
"This extraordinary collection, permeated with myth and with music, follows the deep filial attachment between father and son —the longing of the speaker for his deceased father and the bond he feels for his own young son," Millar wrote. "From the early poem ‘I Carried My Father Across the Sea’ to the imagined plight of contemporary migrants lost at sea in the title poem, it’s hard not to imagine the ghost-themes of death during the Middle Passage permeating the narrative.”
Adesina won the 2023 Creative Writing Grant Award from Harvard University’s historic Woodberry Poetry Room, as well as the 2020 Narrative Prize. He is the inaugural Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Global Black and Diasporic Poetry at the Furious Flower Poetry Center. He earned a Master of Fine Arts from New York University and a doctoral degree from Florida State University.
The other finalist manuscripts in poetry were “Over the Half-Bright World” by Laura Joyce-Hubbard, “This One Life” by Lee Robinson, “Human Nature” by Rob Shapiro, “White Camellias” by Joyce Schmid and “Devotion” by Alison Zheng.
The winner of the 2024 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction is Mi Jin Kim for her manuscript “Invitation: Stories,” chosen by Dawes and guest judges Elizabeth Crane and Laird Hunt. Kim will receive a $3,000 award and publication by the University of Nebraska Press.
Laird Hunt praised Kim’s stories, noting that the collection conveys a sense of reality “in which a car’s A/C blows ‘neither warm nor cool air’; televisions drone at low volume; hams are small and ‘tidily prepared’; mothers die or perhaps don’t, it's hard to say; dream life and waking life casually intermingle; children are loved and loathed in equal measure; and — while feeling is absolutely admitted into the proceedings — sentimentality has been denied entry.”
Kim’s fiction has appeared in A Public Space, Quarter After Eight and swamp pink. A graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, she received the Henfield and Frederick Busch prizes for short fiction. Born in Seoul, she grew up in Los Angeles and now lives with her family in rural South Korea.
The other finalist manuscripts in fiction were “Bad Babies” by Keya Mitra, “The Midwinter Wife and Other Stories” by Cherry Potts, “The Bones of the Mouse Make the Cat” by Jessica Roeder and “Now I'm Photogenic and Other Stories I Tell Myself” by Jill Rosenberg.
The competition runs from Jan. 15 to March 15 annually. Submission details are available online. Previous winning poetry and fiction books are available through the University of Nebraska Press.
Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln's Department of English. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays and reviews by beginning, mid-career and established writers. To support Prairie Schooner and the Raz-Shumaker Book Prize, click here.
