MFA Student Wins Major Poetry Award

torrin a. greathouse awarded Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry
Photo of MFA candidate torrin a. greathouse

MFA candidate torrin a. greathouse won the 2020 Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry for the manuscript Wound from the Mouth of a Wound. greathouse will receive $10,000 and publication by Milkweed Editions next December. Congratulations!

The Ballard Spahr Prize is an annual award given to an outstanding poet residing in Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, or Michigan. In her prize judgement for the winning collection, Aimee Nezhukumatathil writes: "In these pages, the fragments and fusion of public and private desires dig into exhilarating terrain I didn’t quite realize I had been thirsty for all along. The everlasting and intimate result of this book feels like we’re holding a small thunderstorm in our hands.”

greathouse also won Poetry magazine's J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize of $5,000 this year for her poem "On Confinement." She is the author of boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018) and assistant editor of The Shallow Ends. greathouse's work is published or forthcoming in Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Kenyon Review.

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