Congratulations!
Crab Creek Review is excited to announce the winner of the Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize! Judged by Camille T. Dungy, she has selected "Late Afternoon" by Lois Rosen as this year's Poetry Prize winner. You can find Lois's poem as well as other finalists in the upcoming fall issue of Crab Creek Review.
Congratulations to the winner, finalists, and semifinalists in the 2020 Crab Creek Review Poetry Prize! We look forward to seeing your poems in the next issue.
Winner: "Late Afternoon"
By: Lois Rosen
"The rhythms and pacing in this praise poem are intoxicating. All those internal rhymes seeming to prove that this is the only possible center of beauty. The clean tercets overflowing like small patio apartments that can hardly contain all the glory they hold. The craftsmanship in this poem is as delightful to behold as the subject. "Late Afternoon" was fun to read, but also deeply serious. I was happy to return to it again and again."
Lois Rosen joyfully leads Salem, Oregon’s Trillium Writers’ Workshop, the ICL Writing Group at Willamette University, and co-founded the Peregrine Poets. Her poetry collections are Pigeons (Traprock Books, 2004), Nice and Loud (Tebot Bach, 2015), and Diving and Rising (Finishing Line Press, 2021).
Finalists
"Wolf Moon"
By: Melissa McKinstry
"This poem's surprising turn hit me in the gut, but the taut lines and bright details held me like the kind of hug you give someone whose pain you know and you know you can't abate."
Melissa McKinstry lives and writes in San Diego where she mothers her disabled adult son, curates a neighborhood poet tree, and assists with translation of Yiddish literature. She is working on her thesis in the Pacific University MFA program. Her work has appeared in Rattle, The Seattle Review, Clackamas Literary Review, San Diego Poetry Annual, earned honorable mention for the 2020 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, and is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review.
"Slags of Cloud, a Cold Wind"
By: Justin Hunt
"This poem pulled me immediately into its often surprising observations, situating a deeply emotional response to the world within what feels like necessary awareness of desire's dangers and glories."
JUSTIN HUNT grew up in rural Kansas and lives in Charlotte, NC. His work appears or is forthcoming in Five Points, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain.org, The Florida Review, River Styx, Bellingham Review, The Atlanta Review, Cider Press Review, The Bridport Prize Anthology (U.K.), and Southword (Ireland), among other publications. He is currently working on a debut poetry collection. Learn more at www.justinhunt.online
"my season as a comet"
By: Karah Kemmerly
"I love the way the title gives this poem a wild and wonderful new life."
Karah Kemmerly is a queer writer who grew up in northern California and completed her MFA in poetry at Oregon State University. You can find some of her poems in HAD, Redivider, DEAR, and Breakwater Review. She lives in Portland, Oregon with a growing collection of plants.
More about the Judge
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships in both poetry and prose. She is the poetry editor of Orion Magazine. Dungy lives in Colorado with her husband and daughter, where she is a University Distinguished Professor at
Colorado State University.
Colorado State University.