2017 Louis Award Winner

The field of entries this year for the Louis Award was impressive. Our final judge enjoyed all the manuscripts he read and found it very challenging to select a winner. Our judge Joseph Green has selected the Winner: Amy Miller, age 55, for her manuscript The Trouble With New England Girls.

Amy's writing has appeared in Nimrod, Rattle, Willow Springs, Zyzzyva, The Oregonian, Fine Gardening, and Asimov's Science Fiction, and her latest chapbooks are I Am on a River and Cannot Answer (BOAAT Press) and Rough House (White Knuckle Press). Amy won the Cultural Center of Cape Cod National Poetry Competition, judged by Tony Hoagland, the Jack Grapes Poetry Prize from Cultural Weekly, and the Earl Weaver Baseball Writing Prize from Cobalt Review, and was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Tinderbox Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award. Her article "Anatomy of a Poetry Book" appears in the 2017 Poet's Market.

See Amy's Blog: Writer's Island

News

"Sleeping Alone" was a featured poem on Verse Daily.

Six Objects That Are Mine and One That Isn’t

After a day of doctors and work
and money and even
the painstaking steering
to not hit that jerk
in the parking garage,
the soft hermetic
closing of my door sounds
like an army of angels
laying down their guns.
And my kitchen, the last
brown shards of sunset
sliding their blades
across the cabinets,
suddenly is paradise, the faucet
playing small creek music
as six objects on the sill—
two horses, a soapstone god,
the clock, the cup and bowl—
hold quiet court with the one
I’ll never fully own, the plant
turning its panels to light
and mining a life
from its fistful of soil.
        

This Is Still Life
Music Lesson

With Woods in the Background
Here Are Your Humans
Light Weeping Through Honey
Love—This Unfinished Memory
The Trident Poems
Rodeo Perfume
Shadow Nation
How Clean the Seed Becomes
The Drumskin Tight to Your Bones

Tony Howarth
Caroline Johnson
Lois Levinson
Kathleen McClung
Gerry McFarland
Marianne Taylor

Frank Light
Natalie Lobe
Jack e Lorts
Leonie Mikele
Kathleen Naureckas
Robert Okaji
Stephen M. Schicker
Shanee Stepakoff
Carol R. Sunde
Greg Tuleja
Lynne Viti