The Georgia Review congratulates Johanna Magin, who was selected by judge Cole Swensen as the winner of this year’s Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Magin will receive an honorarium of $1,500 for her poem “Trace History,” which will be published in our Spring 2025 issue.
Of Magin’s poem, Swensen wrote:
“‘Trace History’ addresses some of the largest issues inherent in being human—what we leave behind and to whom. And it does so with a delicate obliquity that suggests other themes and concerns that, because they’re not directly named, remain charged with emergence. The language throughout strikes a similar balance of clarity and ambiguity, leaving the whole radiating with both presence and potential.”
Johanna Magin is an American-born researcher, writer, and photographer based in Paris, who holds a PhD in French literature from Columbia University and has taught literature and philosophy for several years at the university level. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, Wildness, Poetry Wales, The Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. She was recently named the winner of the 2024 Francine Ringold Award in the category of poetry and is currently finalizing her first book-length manuscript of poems, which explores an embodied phenomenology of grief and loss.
We would like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. More information about the contest is available here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Loraine Williams Poetry Prize opens again in March 2025.
2024 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner and Finalists
Winner:
“Trace History” by Johanna Magin
Finalists:
“My Ears or a Field of Ears” by Samuel Ace
“In the Room When It Happens” by Allison Adair
“Talking Drums” by Hussain Ahmed
“I Notice You Look Like Your Father” by Kai-Lilly Karpman
“Better Homes & Gardens” by Olatunde Osinaike
“Out of Deaths in a Fit of Sleep I Am Still Here” [excerpt] by Alyx Raz
“Sonnet about Man from Michigan” by Aishwarya Sahi
“Your Dream of My Life, You Who Now Own It” by Talin Tahajian