2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize

In 2020, The Georgia Review announced the winner and finalists for the eighth annual Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, an award for a single poem, to be published in the journal. Ilya Kaminsky served as final judge for the competition, which is named for the late Loraine Williams, a longtime Atlanta-based patron of the arts. Below, hear winner Hannah Perrin King and featured finalists Bernard Ferguson, David Landon, and Juan Luis Guzmán read their poems. All four works appear in our Winter 2020 issue, out now.
Read the full list of finalists, and visit our LWPP info page to learn more about the contest, which will open for 2021 entries on March 1.
 

READ THE POEM HERE

Hannah Perrin King, whose poem in this issue won The Georgia Review’s 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, was also named the winner of Narrative Magazine’s Eleventh Annual Poetry Contest and received AWP’s Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry and New Millennium Writings’ 48th New Millennium Award for Poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Adroit Journal, North American Review, THRUSH Poetry Journal, and Best New Poets, among others. She was a finalist for The Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize and her first manuscript is a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She currently lives in northern California.

 

READ THE POEM HERE

Bernard Ferguson is a Bahamian poet and essayist. A winner of the 2019 92y Discovery Contest, his writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere, and anthologized in the Best New Poets anthology series. He is working on a book about Hurricane Dorian and the climate crisis.

 

READ THE POEM HERE

David Landon is the winner of the 2019 Write Prize, awarded by Able Muse. His poems have also appeared in The Dark Horse, The Southwest Review (Marr Prize runner-up), Think Journal, Birmingham Poetry Review, Sewanee Theological Review, Southern Poetry Review (Guy Owen Prize finalist), Cumberland River, American Journal of Poetry, the Harvard Advocate Centennial Anthology, and elsewhere. He is the Bishop Frank A. Juhan Professor of Theatre Arts Emeritus at the University of the South.

 

READ THE POEM HERE

Juan Luis Guzmán, a poet, professor, and literary/performing arts organizer, earned an MFA in creative writing from California State University, Fresno. With fellowships from Macondo Writers Workshop and CantoMundo, his work has appeared in Huizache, PANK, and The Rumpus, among other journals, as well as the Letras Latinas Blog and Poet’s Quarterly. He is the vice chairman of the Selma Arts Council and served as executive director of LitHop, Fresno’s literary festival, from 2017 to 2019. The former co-director for CantoMundo, Guzmán is a professor of English at Fresno City College.