Athens, GA—The Georgia Review is proud to congratulate Mathew Weitman, who was selected by judge Arthur Sze as the winner of the ninth annual Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Weitman will receive $1,500 for his poem “The Death of a Tree,” which will appear in our Winter 2021 issue.
Of the winning poem, Sze wrote, “In this visionary and mythic journey, the poem moves with oblique exactitude from place to place, across wide swaths of time, and even to the underworld and outer space as it contemplates and delves into the heart of loss.” The Georgia Review will host both Sze and Weitman for a reading in the spring, where they will be joined by the 2020 judge and winner, Ilya Kaminsky and Hannah Perrin King.
Mathew Weitman is Brooklyn-based poet and writer. He received his MFA from the New School, where he was a student editor for LIT Magazine, and his work appears or is forthcoming in The Evergreen Review, The Southwest Review, Bennington Review, Hunger Mountain, Inkwell, New South, and other publications.
We would also like to thank everyone who submitted to this year’s contest; the complete list of finalists can be found below. The prize is named for the late Loraine Williams, a longtime patron of the arts whose gift made it possible. For more information about the contest, please visit here. We look forward to reading work from both previous and first-time entrants when the next Loraine Williams Poetry Prize opens in March 2022.
2021 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize Winner and Finalists
Winner:
Mathew Weitman, “The Death of a Tree”
Finalists:
Rachel Abramowitz, “A Fable”
Fleda Brown, “Granddaddy Long Legs”
Sacha Marvin Hodges, “an ode to morning breath or in which one’s Ex love is a meal that stays rotting in the teeth or in which blackness is America’s Ex love”
Min Kang, “garden sonnet”
Angelo Mao, “Elegy for a City”
Silvina Lopez Medin, “Elegy”
Natasha Sajé, “Palette”
D. S. Waldman, “Virga”
Shelley Wong, “Inventory”