Michigan Quarterly Review 2015 Literary Prizes

$1000 Lawrence Foundation Prize 2015
Alyson Hagy [photo: Ted Brummond] has won the thirty-eighth Lawrence Foundation Prize, joining, among other authors, Charles Baxter, Paul Bowles, Susan Dodd, Clark Blaise, Sena Jeter Naslund, Rebecca Makkai, Alice Mattison, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz. The prize is awarded annually by the Editorial Board of MQR to the author of the best short story published that year in the journal. A mature, finely crafted story set in Yellowstone country, Hagy’s “Switchback” appeared in the Spring 2015 issue.

$500 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize
Raymond McDaniel has won the 2015 Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, which is awarded annually to the author of the best poem or group of poems appearing that year in the MQR. His poem “Claire Lenoir,” appeared in the Fall 2015 issue. This year’s judge, Paisley Rekdal, writes: “The poem marvelously captures, in tone and form, the very essence of the uncanny: one of the poem’s central subjects. The poem renders the process through which we gain knowledge of ourselves and others both mysterious and terrifying at once, recalling for me Howard Baker’s plaintive question during the Watergate trials: What did you know, and when did you know it?”

$500 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets
Katie Hartsock has won the 2015 Page Davidson Clayton Prize for Emerging Poets, which is awarded annually by the editors to the best poet appearing in MQR who has not yet published a book. Poetry Editor Keith Taylor writes about her poem “The Sister Karamazov,” which appeared in our Spring 2015 issue, “We were very impressed by this poet’s ability to enter one of the classics and to reimagine it, adding another emotional and metaphoric level to something that a lesser imagination might see as fixed and impenetrable.”