Announcing the Washington Prize Winner for 2021 !

November 11, 2021

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez Wins the 2021 Washington Prize

From a fine pod of finalists bursting with vitality, Sharon Suzuki-Martinez's The Loneliest Whale Blues rose to claim this year's Washington Prize. It will be released in the spring of 2022.

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez won the MVP Prize for her first book, The Way of All Flux (New Rivers Press, 2012). She also has a micro-chapbook, A Glimpse of Birds over O’odham Land (Rinky Dink Press, 2021).

She created The Poet’s Playlist, became a Kundiman fellow, and her poem, “Last Night in Antsville,” first appearing in Okay Donkey, was a 2018 Best of the Net finalist.

Suzuki-Martinez grew up in Hawaii, earned a PhD in English from the University of Arizona, and now lives with her husband David in Tempe, on the ancestral homeland of the Akimel O’odham.

Says Washington Prize Series editor Andrea Carter Brown, “Sharon Suzuki-Martinez's brilliant new poetry collection, The Loneliest Whale Blues, teems with life. From the smallest cells to the largest creatures, these poems mix present and past, ancient mythology and popular culture, the real and the imaginary, individual and communal on a planet under existential threat. Drawing on the Okinawan-Japanese traditions of her ancestors, and influenced by the Hawaiian people and the Akimel O'odham on whose homelands she has lived and lives, these poems explore what it means to be “other” and how to thrive in the margin by defying expectations. Constantly playful, even joyously so, formally inventive, Suzuki-Martinez coaxes our better natures to contemplate, to embrace the monsters among us—be they snakes, a Black Widow, Mothra, or Godzilla. These are poems intimately of our time, with an idiosyncratic abundance that charms even as it movingly depicts the loneliness at the heart of all life. We can learn from these poems how better to live with ourselves, with one another, with the world.”

Gratitude and Huge Congratulations to the 2021 Finalists:

Celia Bland (NY) Accidental Everglade

Carolyn Cotton (TN) Asylum

Regina DiPerna (CA) The Midwestern Book of the Dead

Kateri Kosek (MA) American Eclipse

Martha McCullough (MA) Wolf Hat, Iron Shoes

Lindsey Novak (AZ) Second Sight

Jennifer Richter (OR) The Really Big One

Leona Sevick (VA) Steady, Girl

Annie Stenzel (CA) In the Before-light

Alice Templeton (CA) Bearings

Mehrnoosh Torbatnejad (NY) Picture an Echo Enchanted

Clare Welsh (PA) Wolfdog

Paloma Yannakakis (NY) your every image untethered

Andy Young (LA) Museum of the Soon Departed

The Washington Prize, awarded annually to a living American or Canadian poet, is $1,500 and book publication for a manuscript of original poetry in English, active since 1985. Poets at any stage in their career may submit a manuscript of 48 to 80 pages between January 15 and March 15. $25 entry fee.

~ Check out our new releases here ~