We are thrilled to announce the winner, finalists, commended collections and special mentions of this 2023 inaugural Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize. Rare Swan Press is deeply appreciative of all the entrants who supported the prize and for the time and expertise of the adjudicating panel and our Guest Judge.
Guest Judge
Jessica Barksdale Inclán
” During much of October and part of November, I read the 39 longlist manuscripts chosen from the initial KAF literary prize submissions. Picked with care by Mark Antony Owen, Sam Rasnake, and Amantine Brodeur; the longlist dazzled. And while reading, I couldn’t help but feel Kari Flickinger sitting with me, comfortable on a nearby chair, drinking some tea, asking me to read bits aloud, especially when I exclaimed.”During much of October and part of November, I read the 39 longlist manuscripts chosen from the initial KAF literary prize submissions. Picked with care by Mark Antony Owen and Sam Rasnake, the longlist dazzled. And while reading, I couldn’t help but feel Kari Flickinger sitting with me, comfortable on a nearby chair, drinking some tea, asking me to read bits aloud, especially when I exclaimed.
I was lucky to have such in-real-life chats with Kari over the years, sometimes at the college where we met, she was my student in several classes; or later at my home during writing workshops. Without a doubt, Kari was one of my favorite students and then favorite writers. She would have been so honored to see people submitting to a poetry contest in her name
As I read, I kept uncovering treasures from the manuscripts that Kari would have loved to mull over. I made notes: Some beautiful poems. Inventive. Packed with allusion. Smart. Wild flourishes. Noise. Fierce. References to mythology. Clear voices packed with some punch. Strong, deep themes. Smart and funny lines. Full stories from the first to last poem.
These manuscripts were so consistently great, I couldn’t put them down until, well, there were no more to read, and I was left with the task of choosing. The winning manuscript These are her thoughts as she falls is rich with an overarching, deep with language but also full of mythology, water, fish, and folktales. As I read it, Kari cackled a little and nodded.
“Yes,” she said to me. “Exactly right.”
But it was a pleasure to read all the collections, and I commend the poets out there doing the work, writing the poems, releasing them into the wild, where they sometimes find good publishing homes like Rare Swan. Thank you all for trusting us with your work.
Adjudicators Panel
Sam Rasnake
” Serving many years as chapbook editor for Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, I discovered that what I enjoyed most about reading chapbook-length works is the unified world poets are able to build – a world readers can’t fully encounter with individual poems – though they may be superb works. The results are not the same. Chapbooks are able to present brief but exciting dimensions for readers to enter, and that is wonderful. Many of the manuscript submissions to the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Literary Prize presented thought-provoking moments that have stayed with me long after my reading was finished. Some entries blended such real situations, such pain and beauty, such feeling that I was, at times, nearly overwhelmed – the juxtaposition of being at once totally connected but emotionally drained, resulting in a grand experience. Emily Dickinson once wrote in a letter: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” That is what good poetry should do, and good writers strive for the goal – creating work that matters. Poets submitting to the KAF Prize did push themselves toward great heights – and some achieved it. At times, I checked to make certain the top of my head was intact. Several manuscripts were that remarkable – making the selection process a challenging yet rewarding venture – one I’m grateful to Rare Swan Press for allowing me to be a part of. “
Mark Antony Owen
“ Launching a new literary prize brings a rattle bag of emotions. Will enough poets submit? Will the quality be as high as hoped? These emotions triple when the prize is in memory of a much-admired writer: all involved feel a collective sense of sacred responsibility. Imagine then the joy, the relief, the delight when not only is the standard high, but each submission speaks to honour our beloved Kari. ”
Winner & Finalists
Winner, Louise Longson
“These Are Her Thoughts As She Falls“
Late-blooming poet Louise Longson started writing ‘with intent’ during isolation in lockdown 2020. Now aged 60-and-counting, she has become widely published in print and online. Her work can be read in One Hand Clapping, Fly on the Wall, Nymphs, Ekphrastic Review, Obsessed with Pipework, Indigo Dreams Publishing, Dust Magazine, Modern Haiku, Dreich, Black Bough Poetry, The High Window, The Poetry Shed, Allegro, the tide rises the tide falls and Vaine Magazine, among others. She is the author of Hanging Fire (Dreich Publications, 2021) and Songs from the Witch Bottle (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). A qualified psychotherapist, she works – still mostly from her home in a small rural village on the fringes of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire – for a registered charity that offers a listening support service to people whose physical and emotional distress is caused by loneliness, often rooted in historic trauma. Her poems bring together her personal and work experiences, translated through the twin prisms of myth and nature.
Twitter @LouisePoetical
Ritual To Make a Hair Shirt
start cutting
every needle-like syllable
scissors
stitches
into the fabric of memory
mortifying
barbed wire words
weave
into the warped weft
of self-worth
scrape
prick
scourge
struggle
to make it fit
until
it tears at the hand-
sewn seams
FINALISTS
Marqus Bobesich
Marqus Bobesich received his BFA from York University (Toronto) majoring in visual arts. His poems have appeared in El Portal, SLAB, and Concho River Review. He works as a writer, musician and voice artist and is currently pitching original projects for film and television.
Instagram: @marqusbobesich
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2upaEvi2b5Bk5OZFRRZRqS
Lucinda Zoe
Lucinda Zoe is an Eastern Kentucky native and transplanted southerner who moved from Kentucky to New York City in 1989. A librarian and archivist by training, and a chef by desire, her fields of study and interests are in philosophy, theology, ancient manuscripts and the culinary arts. After a thirty-year career in higher education at the City University of New York, she retired in 2022 to pursue her first loves and great passions — cooking, traveling and writing. She has written and produced numerous plays and monologues, both in Kentucky and New York, and recently completed a collection of poetry. She divides her time between New York City and a home in upstate New York in the Catskills Mountains where she likes to read, walk, write, bake and tend to her three cats.
Elizabeth Sylvia
Elizabeth Sylvia is a poet and teacher from Massachusetts whose first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. She has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by C&R Press, DIAGRAM, 30 West, and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. Sylvia has been a presenter for the Mass Poetry Festival and received a Shirley Lim fellowship from the West Chester University Poetry Center. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize.
COMMENDED & SPECIAL MENTIONS
Chiwenite Onyekwelu
Chiwenite Onyekwelu’s debut poetry chapbook, EXILED, will be published in 2024 by Red Bird Chapbooks. His poems appear in Adroit Journal, Frontier, Cincinnati Review, Palette, Hudson Review, Lolwe, Chestnut Review, Mizna, and elsewhere. He recently won the Hudson Review Inaugural Frederick Morgan Poetry Prize, and was shortlisted for the Alpine Fellowship Prize 2023. He won the 2020 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize. Chiwenite has served as Chief Editor at The School of Pharmacy Agulu, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, where he’s currently an undergraduate. He’s on Twitter as @chiwenite9
Marie-Louise Eyers
Marie-Louise Eyres received her MFA from Manchester Writing School in 2020 after a multiple brain tumour diagnosis in 2018. Her recent work can be found in Shearsman, Poetry Magazine, Acumen, Agenda, Stand, Modern Poetry in Translation, Portland Review and the anthologies for the Bridport, Bedford, Ginkgo AONB and Live Canon prizes. She has 6 pamphlets with the following small presses: Maverick Duck, Ghost City, Alien Buddha & Finishing Line. Originally from London she lives in California with her family.
Kate Caoimhe Arthur
Kate Caoimhe Arthur lives in Co. Down in Ireland. She spent some years in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where she was Fenland Poet Laureate. She worked in collaboration with the fine art print-maker Iona Howard. She has been published in The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and Blackbox Manifold. She is working on her first collection of poetry.
Susan L. Lin
Susan L. Lin is a Taiwanese American storyteller who hails from southeast Texas and holds an MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts. Her novella Goodbye to the Ocean won the 2022 Etchings Press novella prize, and her short prose and poetry have appeared in over fifty different publications. Find more at https://susanllin.wordpress.com.
Aimee R. Cervenka
Aimee R. Cervenka is a writer, climate activist, and professional baker. Her work has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including Poet Lore, Ascent, and Slab, and her poem “Thinking of Basements” won the 2022 Briefly Write Poetry Prize. Her micro-collection “(Not Quite) Political Animals” was published in March 2023 by Rinky Dink Press. She lives in Spokane, Washington with her husband, dog, and two rabbits.
SPECIAL MENTION
Ana Reisens
Ana Reisens is a poetry farmer. She was the winner of the fall 2022 Sixfold competition, and you can find her poetry sprouting in Crannog, The Bombay Literary Magazine, and Bracken, among other places, and you can follow her on Instagram at @anareisenswrites. She was born on a Monday in March in a land where the snow had not yet melted.
SPECIAL MENTION
Rachel R. Baum
Rachel R. Baum is a Best of the Net nominated poet, kayak angler, dog behaviorist, and APA-ranked pool player. She is the editor of Funeral and Memorial Service Readings, Poems and Tributes (McFarland, 1999), recipient of Best Non-Fiction by Today’s Librarian. Rachel is the founder of Moving Mountains Poets, a group of women poets, as well as the Saratoga Peace Pod, crafters who create warm items for families in crisis. Her poems have been published in OneArt, Jewish Literary Journal, The Phare, Raven’s Perch, New Verse News, and others. Her chapbook Richard Brautigan’s Concussion, was published in 2023 by Bottlecap Press. She lives in Saratoga Springs, New York with her dog Tennyson.
The Kari Ann Flickinger Biennial Memorial Literary Prize 2023 ©Ballerini Book Press
KARI ANN FLICKINGER MEMORIAL PRIZE 