Finalist, 2025 Miller Williams Poetry Prize
In her debut collection True Mistakes, the poet Lena Moses-Schmitt unleashes her powers of scrutiny on herself and on works of art to interrogate the essential nature of consciousness, identity, and time.
As the poet goes about daily life—taking long walks, painting at her desk, going to work, grappling with the deaths of friends, struggling with anxiety and depression—she ruminates on the boundaries between art and reality, grief and joy, living and imagining. For Moses-Schmitt, thought, like painting, is relentlessly high-stakes: “I often think about things so hard / I kill them.” And: “Is it possible to paint myself so precisely / I disappear? Can I remember myself / so completely I’m erased?” In the context of such ruminations, the poet’s reflections on David Hockney’s seminal pool paintings shimmer with sublimity and insight.
Working to turn “mistakes”—misperceptions, errors in life and in art—into sites of possibility and imagination instead of failure or confusion, Moses-Schmitt offers “a truth for every reader,” writes series editor Patricia Smith.
Lena Moses-Schmitt is a writer and artist. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Best New Poets, Narrative, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She currently lives in New York.
“In True Mistakes, Lena Moses-Schmitt’s fabulous debut, this superb poet and visual artist narrows the distance between faces and flowers, between death and children, thinking and living, making art and seeing the future. Moses-Schmitt teaches us to eye with suspicion the marks on any surface (whether page, painting, or pavement), and at the same time to practice making ourselves available to being moved. The poet holds these two impulses in expert, thrilling tension. I loved reading this book. It’s left me all stirred up!”
—Heather Christle, author of The Crying Book and In the Rhododendrons
“Who are we to ourselves? Alone or in the world, in the past or in the future? Can we change, or stop changing? Who is reflected in ‘the painting, which is actually the window’? True Mistakes is full of movement, and its poems are endlessly questing—that effort which suggests both a search and a question. They make living an act of asking.”
—Elisa Gabbert, author of Any Person Is the Only Self
Every year, the University of Arkansas Press accepts submissions for the Miller Williams Poetry Series and from the books selected awards the $5,000 Miller Williams Poetry Prize in the following summer. 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.
“I love poems that vivify and disturb,” says series editor Patrica Smith. “No matter what genre we write in, we’re all essentially storytellers — but it’s poets who toil most industriously, telling huge unwieldy stories within tight and gorgeously controlled confines, stories that are structurally and sonically adventurous, and it’s magic every time it happens. Simply put, when I read a poetry book, I want something to shift in my chest. I want my world to change.”
