2021 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize

In 2021, The Georgia Review announced the winner and finalists for the ninth annual Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, an award for a single poem, to be published in the journal. Arthur Sze served as final judge for the competition, which is named for the late Loraine Williams, a longtime Atlanta-based patron of the arts. Below, hear winner Mathew Weitman and featured finalists Rachel Abramowitz, Angelo Mao, and Natasha Sajé read their poems. All four works appear in our Winter 2021 issue, out now.
Read the full list of finalists, and visit our LWPP info page to learn more about the contest, which will open for 2022 entries on March 1.

 

Mathew Weitman, a Brooklyn-based poet and writer, has work published or forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Bennington Review, The Southwest Review, The Evergreen Review, and elsewhere. He received his MFA from the New School, where he was a student poetry editor for LIT, and will begin an artist residency at Bloedel Reserve in 2022.

 

READ THE POEM HERE

Rachel Abramowitz’s chapbooks include The Puzzle Monster, forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press in 2022, and Gut Lust (Burnside Review, 2020). Her poems and reviews have appeared in Tin House Online, The Threepenny Review, Seneca Review, Kenyon Review Online, Crazyhorse, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Oxford, she has taught English Literature at Barnard College in New York.

 

READ THE POEM HERE

Angelo Mao received his PhD in bioengineering from Harvard University. His first book of poems, Abattoir, was published by Burnside Review in 2021, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, The Yale Review, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He has also written for Opera News and Boston Classical Review.

 

READ THE POEM HERE

Natasha Sajé is the author of Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir-in-essays (Trinity UP, 2020); five books of poems, including the chapbook Special Delivery (Diode Editions, 2021) and the forthcoming The Future Will Call You Something Else (Tupelo, 2022); and a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014). She teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program.