Vulture Gold and Pyrrhic Symphony now available for preorder
We’re excited to share the covers of the 2025 Raz/Shumaker Book Prize winners in Fiction and Poetry. Both collections will be published in September 2026 and are now available to preorder through the University of Nebraska Press.
The winner of the 2025 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction is Micah Dean Hicks for his manuscript Vulture Gold, chosen by guest judges DeMisty Bellinger and Eric Wat with Timothy Schaffert, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner.
DeMisty Bellinger praised Hicks’ stories, noting that the collection “is a gratifying read, satisfying all the desires of good story collection. Modern fairy tales are nothing new, but the author still finds space to venture in new areas, challenging expectations and norms. The characters in each story are strong and diverse, the stories themselves are beguiling in premises and execution. Furthermore, the storytelling is resplendent in effective imagery and moving with measured pacing.”
The winner of the 2025 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Adam O. Davis for his manuscript Pyrrhic Symphony, chosen by guest judges Rowan Ricardo Phillips and Hilda Raz with Timothy Schaffert, Glenna Luschei Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner.
Rowan Ricardo Phillips praised Davis’s poetry, writing, “Pyrrhic Symphony is wild, whip-smart, and irreverent—a maximalist elegy for late capitalism and ecological disaster, set to a beat both comic and catastrophic. It’s part Muriel Rukeyser, part Anne Carson, with a dash of HBO satire and TED Talk dystopia. Its central conceit—a series of poetic ‘dispatches’ from a world breaking under the weight of its own consumption—is sustained across dazzling poems like ‘Future Tense’ and ‘Anthropocene Cool.’”