WE HAVE TWO WINNERS FOR THE 2024 SEXTON POETRY PRIZE

BSPG is perhaps unique in offering a prize for the best American book of poetry (for us to publish) while being a British press. It's a way to build a trans-Atlantic bridge. We are currently distributed in the USA by NBN, and will be moving to Simon and Schuster in 2025. In the UK, we work with BookSource.

This year, distinguished teacher, critic, and poet, Rodney Jones, has selected two winners, who will share the $2,000 USD prize, and publication by 2026 with our press, including distribution in the UK and North America, We're delighted with the winners and gladly announce them below.

In alphabetical order:

Dana Roeser, for her manuscript, I Wake to a Life in Which the Beds Keep Moving

The Judge's citation says:

'I've never read a better contemporary “breakup-book" than Dana Roeser's I Wake to a Life in Which the Beds Keep Moving, including Sharon Olds' Stag's Leap. It has the innovative prosody and original language of the best poetry and, taken collectively, it brings the strength of a novel. Surely, among these manuscripts, it is the one that perhaps Anne Sexton would prefer.'

Jeffrey Skinner, for his manuscript The Sun at Eye Level

The Judge's citation says:

'Jeffrey Skinner's The Sun at Eye Level is masterful, in form and substance, and so near perfect  in craft and voice that, in reading the manuscript several times, I could not find a single line that I would dream of changing.  And Skinner isn't just futzing  around, splashing in puddles. He's writing about real subjects, out of an empowering necessity with astonishing articulation and without sacrificing wisdom or wildness in lines that are as quick as they are resonant.'

Jeffery Skinner says of his win: "I'm very happy to hear I've won the Sexton book prize, especially from such a widely known and respected small press as Black Spring. I have admired the press--its authors, editors, and judges, for many years."

Dana Roeser says of her win: "Anne Sexton was my first poet—and I am so proud to be associated with her in this way."

 

Bios:

Our judge: Rodney Jones (born 1950) is an American poet and retired professor of English. Jones was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (1985), the Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award.

Jeffrey Skinner has published eight full collections of poetry, and a number of chapbooks.  His most recent collection, Sober Ghost, appeared in June, 2024.  In 2014 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and in 2015 was given an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for literature.  His books have been winners of The National Poetry Series, The Crab Orchard Prize for Poetry, and The Field Prize.  Over the years his work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Fence, and Bomb, among many other journals.  His recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Diagram, Volt, and The Paris and Threepenny Reviews. 

Dana Roeser is the author of All Transparent Things Need Thundershirts (Two Sylvias Press, 2019), and her third book won the Juniper Prize at the University of Massachusetts Press. The recipient of prizes, fellowships, and residencies from Pushcart Press, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Great Lakes Colleges Association, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Yaddo, she has served as writer-in-residence at George Washington University, Wichita State University, and Purdue University. Roeser's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and on the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day and Poetry Daily, among others. She is currently an adjunct professor of poetry in the creative writing MFA program at Butler University.