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.’”
About the Author
Adam O. Davis is the author of Index of Haunted Houses (Sarabande, 2020), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of the 2022 Poetry International Prize and the 2016 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, and he has received grants and fellowships from Columbia University, the New Literary Project, the Prague Summer Program for Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. Program for Writers, and the Vermont Studio Center. His work has appeared in AGNI, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry and The Once and Future Lake: Stories for Great Salt Lake. Davis is also co-creator and host of the podcast Poetry Goes to the Movies, along with its digital collection for the Poetry Foundation. He lives in San Diego where he teaches English literature at The Bishop’s School.
