We’re proud to announce that the winner of the 2020 Permafrost Book Prize in Poetry goes to, Sara Ryan for her collection, I Thought There Would Be More Wolves. Congratulations, Sara!
Of the collection, judge, Elizabeth Bradfield said, “I Thought There Would Be More Wolves offers a bold voice, fierce and vulnerable. I admire that while it engages pain it does not stay in that space of hurt but pushes beyond to what’s next.”
Sara Ryan is the author of the chapbooks Never Leave the Foot of an Animal Unskinned (Porkbelly Press) and Excellent Evidence of Human Activity (The Cupboard Pamphlet). In 2018, she won Grist’s Pro Forma Contest and Cutbank’s Big Sky, Small Prose Contest. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Brevity, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, Prairie Schooner, Thrush Poetry Journal and others. She is currently pursuing her PhD at Texas Tech University.
Runner-Up
Benjamin Gucciardi – West Portal
Finalists (alpha by last name)
Mary Buchinger – The Book of Shores
Mary Jo Gillet – Strange Appetites
Molly Kugel – Hertragedarium
BeeLyn Naihiwet – Plenty.
Judge
Elizabeth Bradfield
Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of four books, most recently Toward Antarctica, and her work has been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. Her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize from the Publishing Triangle, a Stegner Fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Founder of Broadside Press, she works as a naturalist/guide locally as well as on expedition ships and teaches creative writing at Brandeis university.
Learn more about Elizabeth here.