Congratulations to the 2015 Book Prize Winners
Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has selected the winners for its annual book awards for poetry and short fiction. The winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Safiya Sinclair for her manuscript, Cannibal, chosen by guest-judges David Baker and Hilda Raz with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. The winner of the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction is Dustin M. Hoffman for his manuscript, One-Hundred Knuckled Fist, chosen by guest-judges Elizabeth Nunez and Bernardine Evaristo with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes.
Poetry book-prize-winner Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and received her MFA in poetry at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Catacombs, a chapbook of poetry and essays, (Argos Books, 2011). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, the Cincinatti Review, the Journal, Devil's Lake, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Amy Clampitt Residency Award, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Summer Words, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is currently pursuing a PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow.
Fiction book-prize-winner Dustin M. Hoffman spent ten years painting houses in Michigan before getting his MFA from Bowling Green State University and his PhD from Western Michigan University. His stories have recently appeared in Pleiades, Smokelong Quarterly, Bat City Review, Midwestern Gothic, Juked, Cimarron Review, the Journal, and Threepenny Review. He is an assistant professor of creative writing at Winthrop University in South Carolina.
The winners were chosen from more than 1,200 submissions from around the world. The winners will each receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press, and their books will be available in September 2016.
The competition, now in its thirteenth year, runs January 15 to March 15 annually. Submission details and a list of past winners are available online at https://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?q=book-prize/past-winners.
Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at UNL. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays and reviews by beginning, mid-career, and established writers.