Phillips selects Stella Reed for 2018 chapbook prize

2018 TUSCULUM REVIEW POETRY CHAPBOOK PRIZE WINNER

Judge Emilia Phillips has selected Origami by Stella Reed of Santa Fe, New Mexico as winner of our 2018 poetry chapbook contest. Origami, for which Reed will receive a $1,000 cash prize, will appear in TTR vol. 14/2018.

Phillips writes of Reed’s chapbook: “Precisely folded along the lines of desire, Origami lives up to its name. The ephemeral haunts these short lyrics, many of them elegies; here, a paper boat writes its memoirs, the name of someone dead is thrown to the ‘passing geese,’ a you turns to vapor, and the text literally fades to gray. Still, the world, with its migrating animals and shifting landscapes, feels ever present, as real as a ‘cinder of glowing bone’.”

Stella Reed is the co-author of We Were Meant to Carry Water, forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press in 2019. She teaches poetry to women in domestic violence and homeless shelters through WingSpan Poetry Project in Santa Fe, NM. She’s recently published in The Bellingham Review, American Journal of Poetry, and Tahoma Literary Review and has a piece forthcoming this summer in the Black Lawrence Press anthology, They Said.

2018 Finalists

Philip Arnold ♦ The Natural History of a Blade

Suellen Wedmore ♦ Petal, Calyx, and Naked Nectar

2018’s Judge

Emilia Phillips is the author of three poetry collections from the University of Akron Press, Empty Clip (2018), Groundspeed (2016), and Signaletics (2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). Her poems and lyric essays appear widely in literary publications including Agni, Boston Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She’s an assistant professor in the MFA Writing Program and the Department of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.