Wayne Johns receives top prize in record-breaking NCLR poetry contest

Published Jul 26, 2019 by
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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.”
The 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.
He is also the author of two chapbooks, “The Exclusion Zone” and “An Invisible Veil Between Us,” which received the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Verse Daily, New England Review, Ploughshares, Image, and Prairie Schooner, among others.
Johns is a former Lambda Literary Fellow in fiction and Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University. A recent short story can be found in “Every True Pleasure: LGBTQ Tales of North Carolina.” He teaches in the Department of English, Communication & Media Studies at Greensboro College, volunteers with the Guilford County High School Poet Laureate program and helps coordinate the annual Greensboro Bound Literary Festival as a board member of the Greensboro Literary Organization.
Hedge Coke is a distinguished professor at the University of California-Riverside. She is the winner of numerous awards, including the American Book Award, the 2015 Wordcrafter of the Year Award and the 2016 Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship. She spent part of her childhood in North Carolina, where she came of age working tobacco fields in Willow Springs.
Hedge Coke described her second-place selection, Debra Kaufman’s “The Ghost Girls of Ottawa, Illinois,” as giving a “solemn tribute to a slice of society paying the price of economic deprivation in a working girl’s blues.” Kaufman, a resident of Mebane, has been a finalist twice before, as well as a previous winner of the Applewhite Prize. She is the author of three full-length poetry collections.
Hedge Coke called her third-place selection, Glenis Redmond’s “Racism Squared,” “a fast take on cold, hard facts beneath every single misguided presentation. If the audience is curious about the reason Ford rallied to create square dance as PE, this piece brings it home.”
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 2020 issues of the journal.
Several more finalists have been selected for publication in NCLR Online 2020:

  • S. Absher’s “Gentile Bellini,”
  • Emily Banks’s “Credit Where It’s Due,”
  • Anna Lena Philips Bell’s “At Carolina Beach,”
  • Barbara Campbell’s “The Tender,”
  • Kat Charron’s “Inheritance,”
  • Michael Gaspeny’s “On the Demise of a Bibliophile,”
  • John Frank Haugh’s “Baba Yaga After a Bad Tinder Date,”
  • Robert Hill’s “Circus Gone Off Line, Fade to Black,”
  • Priscilla Melchior’s “Circumlocution,”
  • Jon Obermeyer’s “Still Life with Monoclonal Antibodies,”
  • Amy Elsie Parkes’s “After the Acquittal,”
  • Tori Reynolds’s “Herd Animal,”
  • Betty Rogers’s “Mount Zion Cemetery,”
  • Mark Smith-Soto’s “Bubbie Jenny and the Lone Ranger,”
  • Melinda Thomsen’s “Old Tractor Equipment,”
  • Eric Tran’s “Treatise on Whether to Write the Mango,” and
  • Marly Youmans’s “The Woman in the Walls.”

The 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.
 
-by ECU News Services