Wayne Johns receives top prize in record-breaking NCLR poetry contest
The North Carolina Literary Review, an East Carolina University publication, received a record number of entries for its 2019 James Applewhite Poetry Prize, which has been awarded to Wayne Johns.
Johns’s prize-winning poem, “Meditation in a Glass House,” will be published in the 2020 print issue of the NCLR, and Johns will receive $250 for his first-place entry. Final judge Allison Adelle Hedge Coke said of Johns’s poem: “‘Meditation in a Glass House,’ ‘where morning glory takes over the world until the first frost,’ holds a supple presence in embracement of life, in muse of moment. Here, sweet and tender details from the field of view wide open hold such grace, introspection, peace.”
NCLR established the James Applewhite Poetry Prize in 2011. Editor Margaret Bauer reports that this year, for the first time, more than 100 poets submitted almost 350 total poems, a 26% increase from 2018, which was also a record-breaking year for submissions. Hedge Coke selected the winning poem from 41 finalists by 37 poets submitted for prize consideration by Jeffrey Franklin, NCLR poetry editor.
Johns’s first book of poems, “Antipsalm,” received the Editor’s Choice prize in Unicorn Press’s First Book Competition Series and honorable mention for the 2019 Brockman-Campbell Award from the North Carolina Poetry Society, given for the best book published by a North Carolina native or current resident.
His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, New England Review, Ploughshares, Image, and Prairie Schooner, among others. He teaches in the Department of English, Communication & Media Studies at Greensboro College, volunteers with the Guilford County High School Poet Laureate program, and is a member of the board of Greensboro Literary Organization, which coordinates the annual Greensboro Bound Literary Festival.
Second place in the poetry contest went to Debra Kaufman for “The Ghost Girls of Ottawa, Illinois,” and third place went to Glenis Redmond for “Racism Squared.”
Hedge Coke also named three poems for honorable mention: Valerie Nieman’s “Late Shift,” Marty Silverthorne’s “Monarch,” and Jane Sasser’s “Franz, North Carolina, 1949.” All of these poems will be published in either the print or online issue of the journal in 2020. Several more finalists were selected for publication in NCLR Online 2020.
NCLR, produced at ECU since 1992, has won numerous awards and citations. The University of North Carolina Press has published NCLR since 2017. Find submission and subscription information on NCLR’s website.
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