The University of Arkansas Press is pleased to announce that the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize has been awarded to Greg Rappleye by series editor Patricia Smith. The poet will receive a $5,000 cash prize, and his manuscript Barley Child will be published in the Miller Williams Poetry Series in the spring of 2025. For almost a quarter century the press has made this series the cornerstone of its work as a publisher of some of the country’s best new poetry. The series and prize are named for and operated to honor the cofounder and longtime director of the press, Miller Williams.
“This is an amazing honor,” Rappleye said. “I am profoundly grateful to the extraordinary poet Patricia Smith for choosing Barley Child as the winner of the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize. It is gratifying to see her confidence and support as Barley Child has evolved to its current form. I am honored to again be included in the series and my thanks to the editorial staff at the University of Arkansas Press for their marvelous and tireless work at assuring the publication of this book.”
Barley Child, Rappleye’s fifth collection, draws from family legends, whispered stories, and sworn denials across four generations of Irish-American lives—recalled, imagined, and reconstructed from census records, old letters, church registries, yellowed newspaper clippings, and a few odd photographs in which the human figures are often unnamed and unexplained. The sum of these affidavits, arrayed across the lyric and narrative lines of these poems, is an amazing human choir whose voices, rising out of shame, poverty, absurdity, violence, alcoholism, madness, and their strained Catholic faith, tell the story of a troubled family from the late-nineteenth century to the present.
Greg Rappleye is the author of Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds, Figured Dark, A Path Between Houses, and Holding Down the Earth: Poems. His poetry has been widely published, including in Prairie Schooner, The Journal of American Poetry, Shenandoah, Poetry, Southern Review, and elsewhere.
In addition to selecting Greg Rappleye’s Barley Child, Smith chose three finalists for the 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize, all of which will be published alongside the winner in spring 2025: Parallax by Julia Kolchinsky, True Mistakes by Lena Moses-Schmitt, and To Let the Sun by John Allen Taylor.
Julia Kolchinsky’s manuscript Parallax is a lyric account of parenting a neurodiverse child under the shadow of the war in Ukraine, the author’s birthplace. As the child expresses his own fascination with death, violence, and the grotesque, the poet’s struggles with parenting overlap with processing the present-day war on the same black soil on which many of her ancestors perished during the Holocaust. Kolchinsky is the author of three previous poetry collection—The Many Names for Mother, Don’t Touch the Bones, and 40 WEEKS. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, and American Poetry Review. She is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Denison University in Ohio.
The poems in Lena Moses-Schmitt’s debut collection, True Mistakes, use the processes of making and looking at art to examine consciousness, the self, grief, mortality, and the concept of the future. As the speaker goes about daily life she interrogates the boundary between life and death, art and reality, fact and feeling, grief and joy, looking and understanding. Moses-Schmitt’s work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in New York.
John Allen Taylor’s debut poetry collection, To Let the Sun, peels back the layers of recovery as an adult who experienced childhood sexual abuse. He uses a poetics of reclamation to write the child-self from a perspective beyond trauma, to document the messiness of survival, the child’s flight from himself, and the uncertain path home. He is the author of the chapbook Unmonstrous, and his work has appeared in Booth, DIAGRAM, The Common, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. He coordinates the Writing Center at University of Michigan–Dearborn and lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Unshuttered (2023), Incendiary Art (2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press.