Hanif Abdurraqib will serve as the final judge for the 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. His first full-length poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016), was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in 2017. His first collection of essays, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), was named a book of the year by Buzzfeed, Esquire, NPR, Oprah Magazine, Pitchfork, and the Chicago Tribune, among others. Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest(University of Texas Press, 2019) became a New York Times bestseller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His second poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House Books, 2019), won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Prize. In 2021, he released A Little Devil in America with Random House, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and won the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and the Gordon Burn Prize. |
The 2023 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize will be accepting submissions until May 15. The prize for the winning poem will be $1,500and publication in the Winter 2023 issue of The Georgia Review. In addition, the 2023 winner will be invited for an expenses-paid trip to Athens, GA, to read with Hanif Abdurraqib. The Loraine Williams Poetry Prize is an award for a single poem, now in its tenth year. The prize was made possible by a gift from the late Loraine Williams, a longtime Atlanta-based patron of the arts. Hear the 2022 winner and featured finalists read their poems. Poets can enter the contest for $30, which includes a one-year subscription. Current subscribers are invited to enter the contest for free. Subscribers can submit to one contest for free for each year of a subscription. COMPLETE SUBMISSION GUIDELINES |
About the Journal
The Georgia Review is the literary-cultural journal published out of the University of Georgia since 1947. While it began with a regional commitment, its scope has grown to include readers and writers throughout the U.S. and the world, who are brought together through the print journal as well as live programming. Convinced that communities thrive when built on dialogue that honors the difference between any two interlocutors, we publish imaginative work that challenges us to reconsider any line, distinction, or thought in danger of becoming too rigid or neat, so that our readers can continue the conversations in their own lives.