WINNER OF THE BACKWATERS PRIZE FOR 2002
JUDGED BY Hilda Raz
Ginny MacKenzie for her manuscript Skipstone.
2002 Judge, Hilda Raz, wrote this about Skipstone:
"Here for your readers is Skipstone, a book both smart and passionate, filled with poems whose words pump color back into language while they both frame and release our best and worst memories. At once traditional and iconoclastic these poems urge their readers to accept the human mysteries of love and art"don't look/beyond the window to where the grass breaks like a fever/above the entrance to Hell." For Persephone and her mother both, for all mythological and other lovers, delight annealsas this fine poetry does."
Ginny MacKenzie received her MFA from Goddard College, and currently teaches creative writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. The Skipstone manuscript placed third for the Morse Poetry Award from Northeastern University in both 1997 and 1998 (Judges Edward Hirsch and Alfred Corn) and place second in Carnegie-Mellon University's book contest in 1997. In 2001 this manuscript placed fourth in the University of Akron Press competition judged by Billy Collins. Individual poems have won many contests, including the Negative Capability contest, and The Madison Review Editor's Prize. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Agni, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, Pequod, Shenandoah, The Anthology of America Verse & Yearbook of American Poetry, Negative Capability, Boulevard, Artful Dodge, the Literary Review, The Madison Review, the North Dakota Quarterly, The Seneca Review, Mudfish and Dogwood.
In addition, her short stories have appeared in such periodicals as New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Korone, and the American Literary Review, as well as in the anthology The Time of Our Lives. Her short stories have been finalists for the Tara Fiction Award and the Stanley Elkin Memorial Award, and have won Caesura magazine's annual award, the New School for Social Research's Aaron H. Rubenfeld Award, Korone's annual story award and Southern Illinois University's John Guyon Memorial Award.
Ms. MacKenzie has also edited and translated two anthologies of contemporary Chinese and American poetry published by Coyote Press as part of a cultural exchange of painters and poets between New York and the People's Republic of China called New Folio, the Asian American Journal and the International Quarterly. She has also guest-edited the Academy of America Poets' magazine, Poetry Pilot, in which she introduced the "misty school" of Chinese poets.
Winners of The Reader's Choice Award
Richard Lehnert for his manuscript A Short History of The Usual.
Richard Lehnert's poems have appeared in such magazines as The Southern Review, The Laurel Review, Barrow Street, The American Scholar, Many Mountains Moving, Fish Drum, Nebraska Review, Spoon River Review, Nimrod, Mid American Review, and many others. Two poems from his winning manuscript have been nominated previously for the Pushcart Prize, and some of the poems were collected in a chapbook published by Whole Notes Press, Grief Needs a Body. Lehnert received an MFA in Writing/Poetry from Warren Wilson College, currently works as a free-lance copy editor, and also reviews recordings for Stereophile magazine as well as films for The Santa Fe New Mexican.
Margaret J. Hoehn for her manuscript The Trajectory of Sunflowers.
Margaret J. Hoehn lives with her husband and two children in Sacramento, California, where she practiced law for many years. She is presently raising her children and doing volunteer work for a hospice program and a medical library. Her poetry has appeared or will appear in Nimrod, New Millennium, Peregrine, Inkwell, The Paterson Literary Review, and many other journals. Her chapbooks, Vanishings, won the 1998 Hibiscus award, and Changing Shapes won the 1999 Howard Quentin Award. In 2000, she received the Hart Crane Award, as well as the annual poetry awards from Andrew Mountain Press, ByLine, and Briar Cliff Review. In 2001, she received the Southwest Writers Poetry Prize, the Calvin Fletcher Memorial Prize for Poetry, the annual poetry awards from Briar Cliff Review and Virginia Adversiaria, and her chapbook, Balancing on Light, won the Riverstone Chapbook Prize. She was awarded the 2002 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize for Poetry.
Listed in no particular order, the finalists for The Backwaters Prize, from which the two Reader's Choice Award winners were chosen after Hilda Raz selected Ginny MacKenzie as the Winner of The Backwaters Prize, were:
Casablanca George Bilgere
Fog Warning Joel Peckham, Jr.
Nowhere W.T. Pfefferle
In Memory of The Fast Break Michael Sweeney
Water and its Light Veronica Patterson
Through Broken Country Charles Atkinson
On the Back of the Animal
Is the Mouth of the Vase Melissa BuckheitA Sail to Great Island Alan Feldman
Bice Barbara Romer
Walt Whitman on Townsend Street Shane Seely
Friendly Fire Karen Zealand
Consolation Prize Laurie MacDiarmid
Especially Then David Moolton
The Backwaters Press
Greg Kosmicki, Editor 3502 North 52nd St. Omaha, NE 68104-3506 (402)451-4052
