Athens, GA—The Georgia Review congratulates Felicia Zamora, who was selected by judge Dawn Lundy Martin as the winner of the tenth annual Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Zamora will receive $1,500 for her poem “A Quadriptych: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility.”
Of the winning poem, Martin wrote:
“‘A Quadriptych: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility’ is an astounding genre-smashing treatise against western humanistic rhetorics rooted in anti-blackness. I’m in awe of this un-crown, crown attack, crownology, as it moves from the brutally personal to critical theory, from math to Descartes, and from the ‘all-white, all-male boardroom’ to ‘My salivary glands & ducts spit out all the “jokes”; how only tiny slivers, close to the surface, work their way out when skin sheds.’ Defiantly and using rich, inventive language, Zamora brings the poem into a new possibility, a fitful resistance.”
The Georgia Review will host Martin and Zamora for a reading in the spring.
Felicia Zamora is the author of six books of poetry, including Quotient (Tinderbox Editions, 2022); I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (University of Iowa Press, 2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in poetry; Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (Red Hen Press, 2020); and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017). She has received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, and Tin House. She won the 2020 C.P. Cavafy Prize from Poetry International, the Wabash Prize for Poetry, the Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award. Her poems appear in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Guernica, The Missouri Review online, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, West Branch, and other publications. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
We would also like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. The prize is named for the late Loraine Williams, a longtime patron of the arts whose gift made it possible. For more information about the contest, please visit here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Loraine Williams Poetry Prize opens in March 2023.
2022 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner and Finalists
Winner:
Felicia Zamora, “A Quadriptych: Sonnets to Break the Crown of Invisibility”
Finalists:
Honora Ankong, “High Life Music”
Helena Chung, “Vital Fluids”
Tyree Daye, “The Matter of Things”
Aria Pahari, “Rhodopsin”
Weijia Pan, “First Time to a Bathhouse”
Courtney Faye Taylor, “Onset”
Yi Wei, “Diction”
Adele Elise Williams, “Idolatry for Dummies”