Laura Lee Washburn is the Director of Creative Writing at Pittsburg State University in Kansas, and the author of This Good Warm Place: 10th Anniversary Expanded Edition (March Street), Watching the Contortionists (Palanquin Chapbook Prize), and The Book of Stolen Images (Meadowlark Press, 2023). Harbor Review’s chapbook prize is named in her honor, and she’s the president of Small Harbor Publishing’s Board of Directors. Her degrees are from Old Dominion University, where she interned for the Associated Writing Programs Newsletter, and Arizona State University. Born in Virginia Beach, Virginia, she has also lived and worked in Arizona and in Missouri. From her home in Pittsburg, Kansas, she edits The Coop: A Poetry Cooperative.
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Judge was Joseph Harrington, who teaches at the University of Kansas. He is the author of Of Some Sky (BlazeVOX Books 2018); Goodnight Whoever’s Listening (Essay Press 2015);  Things Come On (an amneoir)(Wesleyan UP 2011); and the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan UP 2002). His creative work has appeared in BAX: The Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Colorado Review, The Rumpus, Hotel America, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. From 2019-2023, he maintained a real-time verse-chronicle of the climate crisis, at The Poem of Our Climate and Writing Out of Time.

Note from the Judge:
Cheryl Unruh’s Gravedigger’s Daughter stands as a testament to how great writing uses particulars to capture the universal. While few readers may have helped to prepare graves as a child or know what the summer sky looks like from their depths, Unruh’s beautifully crafted reflections unearth the relatable joys and confusions of youth, love, and loss. While each poem preserves a carefully honed memory, the collection as a whole carries the reader through a lifetime with touching humor and heartbreaking grace. It is an intimate look into a specific family, but it stirs familiar emotions that have the magic to conjure readers’ own pasts.

Dr. Julia Galm
2022 Nelson Poetry Book Judge 

Dr. Julia Galm is a Communications instructor at Cloud County Community College, where she works with budding writers to help them hone their skills and voices. She has helped to revitalize CCCC’s creative and artistic journal, The Silver Lining, and she is a board member of the Brown Grand Opera House. Though a recent transplant to Kansas, she has fallen in love with the rolling grasslands of her new home. 

Whether you are new to ekphrasis or an old hand at it, the practice can offer both a concrete anchor to start a piece as well as a sail to push your writing in a new direction. Janice Northerns will read several ekphrastic poems from her award-winning collection Some Electric Hum and share tips to help you take ekphrastic writing to the next level. The discussion will be geared toward prose writers as well as poets.

​Optional: Those who plan to attend are invited to write ahead of time a poem or flash prose piece responding to the painting “Four Sunflowers Gone to Seed” by Vincent Van Gogh (1887). You can view the painting at this museum link:
https://krollermuller.nl/en/vincent-van-gogh-four-sunflowers-gone-to-seed-1

Janice Northerns, of Liberal, is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the 2021 KAC Nelson Poetry Book Award, the KU Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up on a farm in rural West Texas and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas Tech University, where she received the Robert S. Newton Award for Creative Writing. Her work has been widely published in literary journals. Honors include a Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts residency, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference scholarship, and numerous awards for individual poems. Janice and her husband moved to Liberal in 1998, where she taught English at Seward County Community College before retiring in 2019 to write full-time. The landscapes and people of West Texas and southwest Kansas are a steady source of inspiration for her poetry.
 
 
 
Book Description:
 “Some Electric Hum reads … like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. … This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents.”
— Dr. Sandra Cox, judge for the Nelson Poetry Book Award
 

There were several nominees this year that made excellent use of visual art alongside their original verse, and I was charmed enough by each of them that I struggled to put them in a comparable context with works that did not include a visual antecedent for the poetry. The engaging and immediate doodles that illustrate Ruth Maus's Valentine and the historicizations that Mark Scheel offers as paratext for Joseph Maino’s photographs in Star Chaser were both enchanting, but I think the most impressive entrant from this subgenre of poetry was by Robert L. Dean, Jr. I found the intertextual ekphrastic play between Dean’s poems and Steven Schroeder’s watercolors in The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing worked to emphasize the elastic exchange of aesthetic impressions that the images create as context for the poems. I was delighted to find references to REM peppered alongside allusions to Homeric verse, both given equal weight as vehicles for transtextual poetic maneuvers managed with aplomb. 
 
In spite of how impressed I was with that book, I ultimately decided that I must use the verse alone as a means of adjudication. In an effort to decide using that criterion, I noted that three poets in particular—Brian Daldorph, Michael Poage, and Janice Northerns—made use of intricate formal structures for some of their poems but also included poetry that felt highly naturalistic, improvisational, or even overheard. All three poets somehow made at least two disparate modes of narrative verse fit easily into their three respective volumes, and since the Nelson prize is for a book rather than a single poem, I thought I ought weigh the poetry within each volume in terms of how it functions as a unified whole. 
 
Daldorph’s sequencing of Kansas Poems worked beautifully a means by which to evoke the cycles of seasons and human lives; those cycles are woven into the content of poetry, whether rendered individually in bursts of uncomfortable confession, as in “The Football Coach’s Wife,” or colloquially, as is the case for mundane childhood remembrances or even for lists, as in “Laurel Avenue,” that all feel strangely profound in spite of their everyday qualities. Each poem is a small textured fragment given meaning by its place in a larger mosaic that creates an image of Kansas as both a landscape and a cultural context for the residual agrarian rhythms that still shape the early 20th Century.
 
Likewise, the narrative voice in Poage’s You Must Have Your Famine is less varied than the speakers who make up Daldorph's polyphonic mosaic, but the form of Poage’s poetry shifts from the controlled and neoclassical (perhaps most obviously on display in “Scottish Sonnet”) to the conversational and postmodern (“Affection,” for instance, seems as much a review of Lahiri’s The Lowlands as a musing on what love looks like from the outside). As the going-away and coming-home of the poems’ speaker pushes readers away and then pulls them close by turns, the mode of address moves from proud to vulnerable and back around by way of shame and delight, which is surely an achievement of narrative suture owed to the poet’s great skill.
 
In spite of the achievements I’ve noted in Maus, Scheel, Dean, Daldorph and Poage’s collections, I think my favorite of the nominated books is Some Electric Hum. Like Daldorph, Northerns excels at embedding a depth of characterization in an abbreviated sketch of her poem’s speakers, some of whom seem to confess or extemporize in direct address to her readers. Not all the narrative poems function this way; some of the speakers are spied upon from around hospital corners or just-glimpsed in family histories told by distant cousins to readers who find themselves embarrassed witnesses of private dramas and secret tragedies. Northern crafts tender portraits of women held hostage by desire, imagining them in a kind of atemporal community, grappling together with transgenerational trauma and pedestrian misogyny. The poems “Boys Would Come on Horses,” “Zinnia Women,” and “Mother-daughter Dresses” fit together like a puzzle, and their shared thematic content sets up a series of formal poems about marriage in the final section of the volume. This section also achieves the combination of craft with innovation that was so apparent in Poage’s verse; Northerns includes a modified sestina about what holds married people together, a fourteener-ballad about how sometimes marriages fall apart anyway, and an open-verse musing on what it means to watch a once-dear loved one slowly pass away. Whether considering family, motherhood or romantic connections, Some Electric Hum reads to me like a treatise on the ways communities are crafted by wanting, having, and then letting go. Perhaps this year more than any other, readers may wish to consider how desire, possession and loss might become meaningful if understood as necessary preconditions for human connectedness. Janice Northerns uses her poetry to explore how wanting, needing, and even withholding are the practices by which families are forged, maintained, and, when necessary, broken. This book exemplifies her skill in giving language to those fragile and ephemeral experiences of connection, as well as her determination to understand how connection might be felt in the barely perceptible hum of a completed circuit, closed but still alive with alternating electric currents. For this reason, I feel that her work is most deserving of this year's Nelson Award and I congratulate her on the achievement. 
 
All best,
Dr. Sandra Cox