The Barry Spacks Poetry Prize honors Santa Barbara’s first Poet Laureate, our beloved friend and teacher, Barry Spacks. The Spacks Prize is awarded annually for a full-length collection of poetry. The editors of Gunpowder Press will select finalists from manuscripts submitted between January 1 and April 30, 2021.

2020 Spacks Prize

We are excited to announce Curriculum, by Meghan Dunn, as the winner of the 2020 Spacks Prize. Gunpowder Press thanks Jessica Jacobs for her generosity in serving as the final judge.

Of the winning manuscript, Jessica Jacobs writes:

In Meghan Dunn’s incisive debut, we encounter a speaker both student and teacher. These poems delve into the moments that forged her, while offering timely accounts of trying to shepherd students through America’s dark racial history, bearing witness to modern-day lynchings, active shooter drills, and the shock of classmates dead far too soon. Beautifully crafted, every lesson bears surprises: “Cartography” is a study in the landscape of bodies and drift of borders; “Foreign Language,” in the difficulty of holding another’s grief; “Grammar Lesson,” in the moments that reveal us as less than the person we’d most like to be. In Curriculum, all of life, with its many loves and losses, is on the syllabus, and like the best classes, these poems reintroduce us to wonder, making us students again of a world we thought we already knew.

About the winner: Meghan Dunn lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she teaches high school English. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, Four Way Review, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She is a four-time recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and a 2019 Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her website is http://meghandunnpoet.com/

The other finalists, in alphabetical order by poet’s last name:

Luminous Body, Glittering Ash by C.W. Emerson

Ishmael Mask by Charles Kell

The Right Blue Dream Home by Claire McQuerry

To Find Comfort in Others by Stephen Priest

Mother Lode by Peg Quinn

From the Gunroom by Keith Stahl

Divination with a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard

The Public by Patrick Swaney

Sum Ledger by Adam Tavel (forthcoming from Measure Press—congratulations, Adam!)

Judge Jessica Jacobs is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going, published by Four Way Books, was named one of Library Journal‘s Best Poetry Books of 2019. Her debut collection, Pelvis with Distance, won the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry, was an Over the Rainbow selection by the American Library Association, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Julie Suk Awards. Her chapbook In Whatever Light Left to Us was published by Sibling Rivalry Press. She holds an M.F.A. from Purdue University, where she served as the Editor-in-Chief of Sycamore Review, and a B.A. from Smith College. Her poetry, essays, and fiction have appeared in publications including Orion, New England Review, Crazyhorse, and Guernica. An avid long-distance runner, Jessica has worked as a rock climbing instructor, bartender, and professor—leading workshops around the country and teaching for Hendrix College, UNC-Wilmington’s MFA program, and Writing Workshops in Greece, among other programs—and is now the Chapbook Editor of the Beloit Poetry Journal. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina, with her wife, the poet Nickole Brown, and is at work on parallel collections of essays and poems exploring spirituality, Torah, and Midrash.

2019 Spacks Prize

Gunpowder Press welcomed esteemed Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Dunn as final judge for the 2019 Spacks Prize. This year’s winner, chosen by Stephen Dunn, is Glenn Freeman of Cornell, Iowa, for his collection Drinking with O’Hara.

The other finalists, in alphabetical order by poet’s last name:

These Waters , John Belk

, John Belk Rosetta, by Karina Borowicz

by Karina Borowicz Luminous Body, Glittering Ash, by C.W. Emerson

by C.W. Emerson The Invention of the Parachute, by Ken Fifer

by Ken Fifer Into Night’s Tent, by Stephen Frech

by Stephen Frech I Come from a Long Line of Men Who Die in Their Sleep, by Robin Gow

by Robin Gow Our Spilt Blood at the Borders, by Jonathan Greenhause

by Jonathan Greenhause Medicine, 3AM, by Susan Kelly-Dewitt

by Susan Kelly-Dewitt Cautious Horses Eyed Us, by Peg Quinn

The editors of Gunpowder Press were impressed by the precise language and striking images in these manuscripts. We also appreciate Stephen Dunn’s critical eye on selecting a winner from this strong group of manuscripts.

Dunn is the author of over a dozen books of poetry, including the National Poetry Series Prize-winning Local Time (1986), Landscape at the End of the Century (1991), Loosestrife (1996), Different Hours (2000), which won the Pulitzer Prize, What Goes On: New and Selected Poems 1995-2009 (2009), Here and Now (2011), Lines of Defense (2014), and Keeper of Limits (2015). His works of prose include Riffs and Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (1998), and Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs (reissued 2001). In addition to the Pulitzer, Dunn’s honors and awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. He won the James Wright Prize and an Academy Award for Literature. Dunn is distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College.

*Related: Reasons to Submit Your Book for the Spacks Prize*

2018 Spacks Prize

We are honored that Lee Herrick was the final judge for the 2018 Spacks Prize. He selected Michelle Evory Bonzcek’s The Ghosts of Lost Animals as the winning manuscript.

There were 128 submissions for the 2018 prize. Of these, 10 finalists were selected, including the winning manuscript. The other finalists were:

Steve Bellin-Oka, Ash Sonata

Nina Clements, Our Mother of Sorrows

Amy Davis, Wayward

Kathy Goodkin, Crybaby Bridge

Andrew Gottlieb, Tales of Distance

Emily Hazel, The Brave Betweens

Kip Knott, Temporary Agnostic

Jonathan Weinert, Indifferent Country

Reed Wilson, Orpheum

Lee Herrick is the author of Gardening Secrets of the Dead and This Many Miles from Desire, and a third book, Scar and Flower, is forthcoming from Word Poetry Press in 2019. His poems have appeared in many literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks, including The Bloomsbury Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Normal School, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice, and Visions Across the Americas, 8th edition, among others. He is a Fresno Poet Laureate Emeritus and serves on the advisory board of The Adoption Museum Project. Born in Daejeon, South Korea and adopted at ten months, he teaches at Fresno City College and in the MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College.

2017 Spacks Prize

The final judge for the 2017 Spacks Prize was Jane Hirshfield, who selected Aaron Baker’s Posthumous Noon as the winning manuscript.

Other finalists were:

Steven Huff, A Fire in the Hill

Barbara March, Here Is a Woman

Jeff Oaks, Little What

Lisa Rosenberg, A Different Physics

Lynn Schmeldler, History of Gone

Emily Schulten, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar

Melissa Stephenson, After Mating for Life

Angela Voras-Hills, The Account of Worms

Pui Ying Wong, The Feast

Jane Hirshfield’s most recent, eighth book of poetry is The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long listed for the National Book Award and named a best book of the year by The San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Independent Review of Books. Her newest book of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (Knopf, 2015), received the Northern California Book Award. Previous honors include The Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, Columbia University’s Translation Center Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Academy of American Poets, and the National Endowment for the Arts. While never a full time academic, Hirshfield has taught or been a poet in residence at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Virginia, the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars, U.C. Santa Barbara, and elsewhere. Hirshfield was the 2016 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. In 2012 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

2016 Spacks Prize

The 2016 Spacks Prize was awarded by final judge Thomas Lux to poet Kurt Olsson for his book Burning Down Disneyland. Ten finalists were recognized by the press, including the winning manuscript and:

Nan Cohen, Unfinished City

Jeff Ewing, The Wind Apples

Andrew Gottlieb, His Winter Beast

Adam Houle, Stray

Kathleen McClung, The Typists Play Monopoly

Emily Schulten, The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar

Anna Scotti, Bewildered by All This Broken Sky

James Scruton, Ordinary Plenty

Erin Elizabeth Smith, Down: The Alice Poems

2015 Spacks Prize

The inaugural Spacks Prize was awarded by final judge Dan Gerber to poet Catherine Abbey Hodges in 2015 for her book Instead of Sadness, released by Gunpowder Press in December 2016.

Other 2015 finalists were:

