Announcing the Winners of Our TQ19 Contests


Congratulations to Cynthia Dewi Oka, whose poem, “Meditation on the Worth of Anything” was selected by Hoa Nguyen as winner of the TQ19 Poetry Prize.

Cynthia Dewi Oka is the author of Salvage: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2017) and Nomad of Salt and Hard Water (Thread Makes Blanket, 2016). Her work has appeared in ESPNW, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Scoundrel Time, Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and elsewhere. With community partner Asian Arts Initiative, she created Sanctuary: A Migrant Poetry Workshop for immigrant poets in Philadelphia and is a recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and is originally from Bali, Indonesia.

From Hoa Nguyen’s Judge’s Citation . . .

“This poem moves with the tension and demands of narrative and syntax on the one hand and the registers of speech and forms of address on the other. At once tangential yet direct, the pleasure and depth resides in the off balancing of language and its tone, packed with precision, particulars, and the unexpected. Political and personal, the poem’s meditation confronts while making space for its readers’ alertness and we’re held there.”

Read Cynthia Dewi Oka’s prize-winning poem >>  

 

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Congratulations to S. Brook Corfman, whose hybrid text, “A Woman Named George,” was selected by Danielle Dutton as winner of the TQ19 Prose Open Prize.

 

S. Brook Corfman is the author of Luxury, Blue Lace, chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, and the forthcoming collection My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites, chosen by Cathy Park Hong for the Fordham POL Prize, as well as two chapbooks. They are an editor at Pinwheel and live in Pittsburgh. @sbrookcorfman & sbrookcorfman.com

 

From Danielle Dutton’s Judge’s Citation . . .

There’s such energy in this story, a really wonderful movement of thought and feeling. I felt surprised by these movements again and again, consistently delighted by what the story brought before me with each new shift, each new insight, each new image or figure. Reading it I kept thinking Where did this come from? and that’s my favorite feeling to have when I read. That shock of unrecognition. That feeling of finding something that feels right and also new.

 

Read S. Brook Corfman’s prize-winning work >>