Judge Paisley Rekdal had this to say about the winner, “A selection of poems ambitious both in scope and energy. These are poems that investigate race, class, and nostalgia via personal memories of the narrator’s family and Southern history itself. The poems push deeply into uncomfortable territory with grace, nuance, and real complexity. Wonderful.”

Maria Isabelle Carlos is a writer from Missouri. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Tin House Online, Hyphen Magazine, VIDA Review, and elsewhere, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net. She is the winner of the 2020 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award and received Honorable Mention for the Rita Dove Poetry Award from the Center for Women Writers. She received the Thomas Wolfe Scholarship at UNC-Chapel Hill and is currently an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at Vanderbilt University. She is the editor of Inch, a quarterly series of micro-chapbooks from Bull City Press and resides in Nashville, Tennessee. Read more at www.mariaisabellecarlos.com