The University of Nebraska Press is proud to announce the winner of The Backwaters Press Prize in Poetry for 2024: Kimberly Ann Priest and her manuscript Wolves in Shells.
“Wolves in Shells carries a narrative that spanned over two decades of my life and, in the words of Kamala Harris, provides evidence that I, and all of us, ‘exist in the context of all in which [we] live and what came before [us].’” said Priest. “I feel this deeply—the impact of systems and communities past, present, and future that impact our individual formation and collective survival, as well as the impact of personal traumas ensuring our bodies keep the score. I could not be more pleased that this is the book among all my books that has been chosen for an award.”
Priest is a neurodivergent writer and the author of the forthcoming books tether & lung (Texas Review Press) and Floralia (Unsolicited Press) as well as Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications). An assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Permafrost, Copper Nickel, and Birmingham Poetry Review.
Priest will be awarded $2,000 for her winning collection and it will be published in the fall of 2025.
The judge this year was Tomás Q. Morín, the author of the poetry collections Machete, A Larger Country, and Patient Zero. He is also the author of Where Are You From (Nebraska, 2024) and the memoir Let Me Count the Ways (Nebraska, 2022). He is the winner of the 2022 Writers’ League of Texas Nonfiction Book Award. Morín is currently on the faculty at Rice University.
“Wolves in Shells by Kimberly Ann Priest is a piercing rebuke of ‘our dependency on machinery/ that harms us,’” said Morín. “That machinery is patriarchy, marriage, and gender inequality. A blistering chronicle of a life lost—children, home, health—and regained. Muriel Rukeyser asked, ‘What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open.’ Each of these poems moves with the honesty of an ax.”
The honorable mention winner is Kerry James Evans. He will be awarded $1,000 and his manuscript, Nine Persimmons, will be published in the spring of 2026.
Of Nine Persimmons, Morín said: “’I play it out measure by measure,’ writes Kerry James Evans. And those soulful measures are filled with a music that is unabashedly Southern. These poems are haunted, full of grit, and down-home. They have no quit in them. If the great Harry Crews had written poetry, he might have written something like Evans’s Nine Persimmons.”
Kerry James Evans is the author of Bangalore (Copper Canyon), and he teaches in the English department and creative writing program at Georgia College & State University.
“Having moved a great many times in my life, ‘place’ has a significant role in my life,” said Evans. “After I was born, my father joined the Air Force and his first assignment was at Offut Air Force base, so many of my first memories, including the birth of my brother, took place in Nebraska, so when I found out Nine Persimmons was named Honorable Mention of the Backwaters Poetry Prize, I couldn’t have been happier. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone at the Backwaters/UNL Press for giving this collection a home.”
The 2023 Backwaters Prize winner was Julie Choffel of Hartford Connecticut. Her winning collection Dear Wallace will publish in October 2024.
The University of Nebraska Press acquired The Backwaters Press in 2018 and continues its yearly poetry prize.
