Lena Shull Book Contest Winners
The North Carolina Poetry Society is pleased to announce that the winner of the 2024 Lena M. Shull Poetry Book Award is Smoke Memories by Doug Sutton-Ramspeck of Black Mountain. Christopher Salerno served as contest judge.
Honorable Mention was awarded to Field as Auditorium by Maura High of Carrboro and Little Draughts and Hurricanes by Becky Nichole James of Fayetteville.
Sponsored annually by the North Carolina Poetry Society, the Lena Shull Book Award honors the best manuscript of unpublished poetry written by a native or resident of North Carolina.
NCPS guidelines for submission can be found here.
Past Winners
2023 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Jim Zola for It’s the Unremarkable that Will Last, selected by the contest judge,
Christopher Salerno.
Jim Zola is a recently retired children’s librarian. He grew up in upstate New York and has lived in Missouri, Michigan and now North Carolina for the past 32 years. Past occupations include a teacher at the school for the Deaf, security guard, and toy designer for Fisher-Price. His poetry books include One Hundred Bones of Weather (Blue Pitcher, 1990), What Glorious Possibilities (Aldrich, 2014), Monday After the End of the World (Kelsay, 2020), Erasing Cabeza de Vaca (Main Street Rag, 2020), and It’s the Unremarkable That Will Last (Redhawk, 2024), winner of the Lena Shull Book Award.
2022 Lena Shull Book Award winner:
Ana Pugatch for Engrams: Seven Years in Asia, selected by the contest judge, Ray McManus.
Ana Pugatch is a Pushcart-nominated poet. She received her M.F.A. from George Mason University, where she was awarded the ’20-’21 Poetry Heritage Fellowship. Before then she lived in Asia, teaching English in China and Thailand, as well as studying Buddhism. Ana’s work has been featured in publications such as Literary Shanghai and The Los Angeles Review. She has an Ed.M. from Harvard and a B.A. from Skidmore College. She now lives in Raleigh, NC with her husband and son.
2021 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Anne Maren-Hogan for Vernacular, selected by the contest judge, Marcus Jackson.
Anne Maren-Hogan writes and gardens in one of the oldest intentional communities in the country, dedicated to simplicity, sustainability, and consensus decision-making. Her childhood on an Iowa farm, which her family still farms, provides material for her poetry, as deep and rich as the black earth from which she comes. Anne began writing poetry after raising children and gives credit to her writing group for their edits and insight. Her first chapbook, The Farmer’s Wake, was published by Finishing Line Press. Her second chapbook, Laying the Past in the Light, published by Longleaf Press, looks at the mystery of death and resurgent power of landscape.
2020 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Michael Hettich, for The Mica Mine, selected by the contest judge, Patricia Ann Mayorga.
Michael Hettich was born in Brooklyn, NY, grew up in New York City and its suburbs, and presently lives in Black Mountain, NC, where he intends to stay for the rest of his days. Hettich holds an MA in creative writing/poetry and a Ph.D. in English and American literature; for 28 years he taught English and creative writing at Miami Dade College. He has published twelve full-length books of poetry and an equal number of chapbooks. His most recent book, To Start an Orchard, was published by Press 53 in September, 2019. His awards include three Individual Artist Fellowships from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs; The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry (for Systems of Vanishing); The David Martinson Award in Poetry (for The Frozen Harbor), and a Florida Book Award.
2019 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Kathy Cantley Ackerman, for A Quarrel of Atoms, selected by judge Allison E. Joseph.
Kathy Cantley Ackerman holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Coal River Road (Livingston Press), three poetry chapbooks, and The Heart of Revolution (University of Tennessee Press). Her poems have appeared in a variety of journals. Her latest collection was a finalist for the Howling Bird Press Book Prize and The Dogfish Head Prize. She serves as Dean of Arts and Sciences and Writer-in-Residence at Isothermal Community College in Spindale, North Carolina, home of the incomparable WNCW radio.
2018 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Steve Cushman, for How Birds Fly, selected by judge Patricia Fargnioli
Steve Cushman earned his MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Greensboro. His novel, Portisville, won the 2004 Novello Literary Award and was a finalist for the Independent Publisher’s Book Award and Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award. He is author of novels Heart With Joy (2010), Hopscotch (2017), and a short story collection, Fracture City (2008). He has two poetry chapbooks: Hospital Work (2013) and Midnight Stroll (2015). Steve will read from How Birds Fly at the NCPS meeting at Weymouth on March 10th and will read and offer a workshop at Poetry Day at Lenoir-Rhyne University on April 21st.
2017 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Janis Harrington, for Waiting for the Hurricane, selected by judge Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Waiting for the Hurricane is a collection of lyric narrative poems about three generations of Harrington’s family. Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, the contest judge, said: “These honest poems, the kind that remain with you, are about family in all of its complexities, its love-hate world of birthing, of wake keepings and funerals, its deep secrets and unforgivable sins.”
Harrington’s poems, stories, and essays have appeared in journals and anthologies in Europe and the USA, including Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press); New Southerner Anthology; The Homestead Review; Kakalak 2016; Off the Coast; and Midwestern Gothic. She has a Masters degree in English with a Creative Writing focus from North Carolina State University. She lives in Chapel Hill.
2016 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
J. S. Absher, for Mouth Work, selected by judge Ann Garbett.
“Voice seems to me to be that elusive quality which immediately tells the reader the difference between Charles Simic and Billy Collins. And I believe that freshness and invention are beyond the power of a judge to predict, though not to recognize…. J. S. Absher’s Mouth Work is outstanding in all these qualities. Throughout, Mouth Work offers a strong sense of place—Appalachia and North Carolina specifically, its rivers, its flora. These poems speak for one who has teeth and stomach and faith for what’s unseen in history and in ourselves.”—Ann Garbett
J.S. Absher has been a missionary, offset printer, teller, janitor, records manager, editor, and consultant, sold mutual funds, and surveyed scrub timberland. Absher’s poetry has been published or is forthcoming in numerous journals and anthologies, including Tar Heel Review, North Carolina Literary Review, Kakalak, and The Southern Poetry Anthology, VII: North Carolina. In addition to winning the 2015 Lena M. Shull Book Contest sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society, his work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has won various prizes, most recently from Kakalak. He was named a finalist in the 2015 James Applewhite Poetry Prize competition. He has published two chapbooks, Night Weather (Cynosura Press, 2010), and The Burial of Anyce Shepherd (Main Street Rag Publications, 2006). An electronic edition of Night Weather was issued in 2016.
To read a review of Stan’s book written by Susan Laughter Meyers and published in the 2017 issue of the North Carolina Literary Review, click here.
2015 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Gail Peck, for The Braided Light, selected by judge Tom Yuill.
“In these luscious poems, emanating from the paintings of Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh, other scapes emerge transfigured by the poet’s eye. In ‘Grand Decorations, the Clouds,’ Peck writes, ‘This is how I want death to be, not the white and white / of sheets . . . to mark the days. / Let me be lifted by the clouds . . .’ And what a refrain as the book unfolds on a plethora of scenes loaded with lilies, bridges, willows, sunflowers, crows and wheat fields. All this woven into the poignancy of the personal. Through it all, the poet walking us down a path of reinvention.” — Julie Suk.
Gail Peck has published eight books of poetry: The Braided Light, Within Two Rooms, Counting The Lost, From Terezin, Thirst, Foreshadow, Drop Zone, and New River. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals. Poems have also appeared in the anthologies The Southern Poetry Review Anthology, Word and Witness: 100 Years of Poetry in North Carolina (Carolina Academic Press); Uncommon Place: An Anthology of Louisiana Poets (LSU Press); and After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery for Life-Shattering Events (Sante Lucia Books).
2014 Lena Shull Book Award Winner:
Becky Gould Gibson, for Heading Home, selected by judge Diane Lockward.
Heading Home concludes with a quotation from E.O. Wilson: “We did not come to this planet as aliens.” The poems in this volume speak to the intimate connection between human beings and the rest of the natural world, between ourselves and figures of the past. The poet acts as observer, companion, friend, lover, daughter, sister, mother, and fellow writer. She addresses a wide variety of creatures—from a blue chicory flower to a great blue heron, from Socrates in the underworld to a grandchild gestating in her mother’s womb.
Becky Gould Gibson is the author of Heading Home (Main Street Rag, 2014), winner of the 2013 Lena Shull Book Contest; Aphrodite’s Daughter (Texas Review Press, 2007), winner of 2006 X. J. Kennedy Prize; Need-Fire (Bright Hill Press, 2007); and First Light (Emyris Press, 1997). Her work often invokes the stories of women in history and myth. Gibson taught literature and writing at Guilford College until her retirement in 2008. She then served as the Gilbert Chappell Distinguished Poet for the Central District from 2009 to 2011. She is the recipient of the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2008 Brockman-Campbell Award and lives in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.