Endowed in perpetuity by the Glenna Luschei Fund for Excellence

Error message

  • Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::__wakeup() should either be compatible with DateTime::__wakeup(): void, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/www/html/prairieschooner.unl.edu/public/sites/all/modules/date/date_api/date_api.module).
  • Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::format($format, $force = false) should either be compatible with DateTime::format(string $format): string, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/www/html/prairieschooner.unl.edu/public/sites/all/modules/date/date_api/date_api.module).
  • Deprecated function: Return type of DateObject::setTimezone($tz, $force = false) should either be compatible with DateTime::setTimezone(DateTimeZone $timezone): DateTime, or the #[\ReturnTypeWillChange] attribute should be used to temporarily suppress the notice in include_once() (line 143 of /var/www/html/prairieschooner.unl.edu/public/sites/all/modules/date/date_api/date_api.module).
A Mind Like This
A Mind Like This
Susan Blackwell Ramsey
Winner of the 2011 Book Prize in Poetry

The winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2011 is Susan Blackwell Ramsey for her manuscript, A Mind Like This. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. She was born in Detroit, received her BA from Kalamazoo College and has managed to live in Kalamazoo most of her life. She taught high school, gardened for hire, and worked as a horticultural transparencies librarian, but has primarily been a bookseller. While she and her husband, Wayne, raised three children, she worked at Kalamazoo's oldest independent bookstore and began publishing poems, receiving an Irving S. Gilmore Emerging Artist Grant. When the bookshop closed she was admitted into the University of Notre Dame's Creative Writing MFA program, where she was given the department's Mitchell Award. Her work appeared in Wayne State University's New Poems from the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, in 2006 she won the Marjorie J. Wilson Award from Margie: The Journal of American Poetry, and David Wagoner chose her "Pickled Heads, St. Petersburg" for the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry. She currently teaches spinning, knitting, and creative writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

About The Book

Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s A Mind Like This is a work of humor and wit, unexpectedly delightful and full of surprises as it reflects on the oddness of everyday life, the natural world, literary history, popular culture, and more. Everything is fair game for Ramsey, who finds poetry in love and sickness and life, of course, but also in knitting and unreliable bladders and the peculiar name of Kalamazoo. Neruda makes an appearance, as do Eric Clapton and Brahms, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and Jimmy Stewart.
 
 
Whether observing the pickled heads of Peter the Great’s offenders, wondering “How to Seduce Henry David Thoreau,” becoming the insecure voice of Kalamazoo, or puzzling over the intricacies of the  mind that blocks a dear friend’s birthday while preserving the name of Emily Dickinson’s dog in perpetuity, Ramsey’s collection is wise and funny, allusive and deeply felt.

About The Author

Susan Blackwell Ramsey is an instructor at Kalamazoo Institute of Art. She won the Marjorie J. Wilson Award from Margie: The Journal for American Poetry and her poem “Pickled Heads, St. Petersburg” was chosen for the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry.
 

Order Books From The University of Nebraska Press