Past Winners
2008
Kara Candito, Taste of Cherry
The winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in poetry is Kara Candito for her manuscript, Taste of Cherry. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Her poems and critical prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2007, Poet Lore, the Florida Review and the Pedestal Review. She has received awards for her poetry, including an Academy of American Poets prize and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. She has worked in the publishing industry in New York City, taught E.S.L. in Rome and earned a M.F.A. in poetry from University of Maryland, College Park. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Florida State University, where she specializes in poetry and literary theory.
The runner-up in the poetry category is Adrian Matejka for his manuscript, Mixology. He will receive a $1,000 prize. Matejka is a Cave Canem fellow and the author of The Devil's Garden (Alice James Books). His work has appeared or his forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Pleiades. He teaches creative writing and English Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.
We will announce the winner of the 2008 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction very soon. Please visit our website at prairieschooner.unl.edu for updates and information.
2007
Mari L’Esperance, The Darkened TempleKatherine Vaz, Stories from the Portuguese
Mari L’Esperance is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, where she was a New York Times Company Foundation Creative Writing Fellow. L’Esperance’s poems have appeared in Pequod, The Beloit Poetry Journal, Barnabe Mountain Review, Salamander, and several other periodicals and an anthology. A chapbook manuscript, Begin Here, was awarded first prize in the 1999 Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press national chapbook competition and was published in 2000. In 2002 L’Esperance received a Pushcart Prize nomination for her poem "Pantoum of the Blind Cambodian Women”, which was published in The Worcester Review. L’Esperance has been awarded residency grants from Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and Hedgebrook. She has taught creative writing at NYU, Merritt College in Oakland, California, and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She is currently training to be a psychotherapist and lives in Oakland.
L’Esperance, who is of Japanese and French Canadian-American descent, was born in Kobe, Japan and raised in southern California, Micronesia, and Japan.
Katherine Vaz, a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in creative writing at Harvard University and a 2006-7 Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute, is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Saudade (St. Martin’s Press, 1994), the first contemporary novel about Portuguese-Americans from a major New York publisher. It was selected for the Barnes & Nobles Discover Great New Writers series. Her second novel, Mariana, has been printed in six languages (English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek) and is a bestseller in Portugal. The U.S. Library of Congress picked it as one of the Top 30 International Books of 1998.
Her collection Fado & Other Stories won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous literary quarterlies, and she does occasional book reviews for The Boston Globe. Her children’s stories have been included in the anthologies A Wolf at the Door (Simon & Schuster, 2000), The Green Man (Viking, 2002), Swan Sister (Simon & Schuster, 2003), and The Faery Reel (Viking, 2004). Vaz is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the Library of Congress, housed in the Hispanic Division alongside recordings made by Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Gabriela Mistral, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The Portuguese-American Women’s Association (PAWA) named her 2002 Woman of the Year. She was appointed to the six-person U.S. Presidential Delegation to open the American Pavilion at the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon.
2006
Paul Guest, Notes for My Body DoubleJesse Lee Kercheval, The Alice Stories
Paul Guest's first collection, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, won the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His poems appear in Poetry, The Southern Review, Slate, Crazyhorse, Verse and elsewhere. He lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Notes for my Body Double, was published in 2007 by the University of Nebraska Press. I'm a visiting professor of English at the University of West Georgia. He is the recipient of a 2007 Whiting Award. Recently, Ecco acquired his memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, plus a collection of poems.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is the Sally Mead Hands Bascom Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is the author of six books and two chapbooks, including the story collection The Dogeater, the memoir Space, the novel The Museum of Happiness, and the poetry collections World as Dictionary and Dog Angel.
2005
Kathleen Flenniken, FamousJohn Keeble, Nocturnal America
Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She is the recipient of a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, along with grants from Artist Trust and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Her first collection of poems, Famous, has been named a Notable Book of the Year by the American Library Association (ALA).
Kathleen is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, an all-volunteer non-profit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets. She’s taught poetry in the schools through the Washington State Arts Commission, Writers in the Schools, Powerful Partners, Northwest School, and led poetry workshops for students of all ages.
She grew up in Richland, in Eastern Washington and is a Northwesterner through and through, a daughter of Oregonians. She moved to Seattle in her twenties to marry, and her husband and three children still live there.
She came to poetry late, after earning B.S. and M.S. degrees in Civil Engineering from Washington State University and University of Washington, and working eight years as an engineer and hydrologist, three on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. She started writing when she quit work to stay home with our children.
For years her subject has been domestic, ordinary life. She sees herself as a natural historian of interiors. This is the focus of Famous. Her work recently has taken a turn, and she’s in the midst of a series of poems about growing up near and working at Hanford, where plutonium was produced for the atomic bomb. The new work is fueled by her growing distress about her country’s future.
K. L. Cook’s award-winning stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including American Short Fiction, Threepenny Review, and Harvard Review. Cook teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona.
Born in Dumas, Texas, K.L. Cook grew up in Houston, Dallas, Amarillo, and Las Vegas. He teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona and is also a member of the graduate faculty at the Spalding University MFA Program for Writers. He lives in Prescott with his wife, playwright Charissa Menefee, and their four children.
Cook is the author of two books of fiction: a novel, The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow/Harper Collins 2006), and a collection of linked stories dealing with the same family of characters, Last Call (University of Nebraska Press 2004).
His essays, and articles have appeared in numerous literary journals, magazines, and newspapers, including Poets & Writers, Arts & Letters, Post Road, Puerto del Sol, and Witness.
He won the Grand Prize in the 2002 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Arts Series. Cook has also been honored with an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fiction Fellowship, two Pushcart Prize nominations, and artist residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, the Millay Colony for the Arts, and The Vermont Studio Center. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and winner of a City of Charleston Literary Arts Award.
2004
Rynn Williams, Adonis GarageBrock Clarke, Carrying the Torch
Rynn Williams took a Master's Degree in English at NYU in 1990. In 2001, after the birth of Beckett, her third child, Williams went back to school -- this time to Warren Wilson’s low residency MFA Program for Writers in Asheville, North Carolina.
She continued to publish. Williams’s work has been featured in The Nation, Massachusetts Review, Field, Agni Online, New York Quarterly, and North American Review, among other journals. In 2001 she received a New York State Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. She is a tutor at the Center for Immigrant Education and Training at Laguardia Community College in New York. She lives in Brooklyn.
Brock Clarke is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of the novel The Ordinary White Boy and of What We Won’t Do, a short story collection that won the 2002 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction and most recently, An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England.
He is the 2000 winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction, selected by Mark Richard. He was also recently awarded a Walter Dakin Fellowship at the 2002 Sewanee Writers Conference and named a fellow at the Wesleyan Writers Conference. He is from upstate New York. He received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Rochester. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Mississippi Review, American Fiction, The Journal, Brooklyn Review, South Carolina Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, Twentieth Century Literature, and Southwestern American Literature. He has received awards from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the New York State Writers' Institute. He lives with his wife, Lane, and their son, Quinn in Clemson, South Carolina.
2003
Cortney Davis, Leopold's ManeuversK. L. Cook, Last Call
Cortney Davis is a nurse-practitioner in Danbury, Connecticut. She is the author of I Knew a Woman: The Experience of the Female Body, published by Random House in 2001 and in paper by Ballantine Books in 2002. Her collection of poetry, Details of the Flesh, was published by Calyx in 1997. Her poetry has appeared in the journals Crazyhorse, Poetry, Witness, and others. Leopold's Maneuvers takes the body - gorgeous, suffering, medicalized, mythologized, abused, and loved - as its central topic. Both harsh and beautiful, these poems are acts of spiritual survival, one woman's necessary testimony and confession.
K. L. Cook teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College in Arizona, where he also serves as the associate dean. His fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in journals including the Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Witness, and Shenandoah. Last Call is a collection of connected stories focusing on one Texas family--unlucky men and women who drink, fight, and love their way through disaster. While these stories deal with broken relationships and pain, they speak of our capacity to move forward through life's hardships.Narrated by different characters and set in Texas, Las Vegas, and Costa Rica, these moving stories promise a gritty, hard hope.
